An open letter to James Hudson (aka the twat that was in the wrong lane and so crashed into my car yesterday) – eventhough he’ll probably never read it. (which might be best).

Dear James,

You, sir, are a twat. I will use the rest of this letter to explain how I came to this conclusion.

1)       You drive like a twat: when there are three lanes on the approach to a roundabout, all of which are clearly marked with arrows showing which way you should go in each lane, you should not be in the middle lane to turn left when the arrow for that lane clearly directs you to turn right or go straight ahead in that lane.

2)       You behave like a twat: when your twat-like driving leads to an inevitable collision it is not acceptable to get out of your car and accuse the other driver (me) of being to blame when they were in the correct lane and got cut up by a twat (you). It is also unreasonable to expect the other driver to follow you to the car hire depot so that you can return the car in time to catch a taxi to the airport. No reasonable person would folow you. I am a reasonable person. When I’m trying to take your details you should not return to your car. However much of a hurry you are in you should not start driving off and only stop when I threaten to call the police and report you leaving the scene of an accident.

3)       You also look like a twat with your silly facial hair.

I hope that you missed your flight and I hope that when you do eventually get to wherever you were going the hotel is shit, with dirty rooms, crap views and that the food gives you severe food poisoning.

That is all

Strokey

See, Daventry is a real place. 
And it's been a real place without any drinking water for three days now. We now have magical taps of poison in our kitchen rather than regular water taps.
It seems that there have been people fighting in Tesco over bottled water - which there now seems to be loads of in all the supermarkets.
My (new) boss cleaned his teeth using a can of Fanta yesterday morning.

I've been doing my new job for a week and now and it seems OK. I'm still not totally sure what I'm supposed to be doing -all I seem to have done so far is read travel plans and policies behind writing them - and it doesn't seem to be as much of a laugh as there was at the college but I think it'll be good. There's one fella that seems to wear ear-muff type things (like workmen digging up the road wear) all the time. In an office on the 4th floor. he did take them off to talk to me when I was introduced to him though, which I thought was nice. 

I never thought that owning our own house would be so much hassle. All of the holiday entitlement that I’ve used so far this year and most weekends has been spent painting, re-felting the shed roof or doing stuff to the garden.

I booked the February half term off thinking it’d be nice and relaxing. We spent the whole week – apart from one day where we went to Melton Mowbray to get a pork pie, which was very nice, but not really relevant to my point - clearing trees from the garden and then laying nearly £300 worth of gravel (green slate - some of which has a mineral vein running through it in case anyone's interested, although I'm sure you're not!).

I spent Good Friday sowing grass seeds in the hope that a lawn would grow. But it snowed the following day and I think that that might have killed the grass seeds. The seed box said that we should see some growth within a week. There’s still just soil where my lawn should be. Although “my lawn” has now become “Emma’s lawn”  - I’ve done the job once (whether I did it right or not doesn’t matter), if she still wants grass she’ll have to do it now.

I’ve booked next week off, but we’ve decided that there’s no way we're spending that doing gardening. So we're going to Blackpool instead.

 Yesterday I climbed into the new cupboard that we had delivered in work to see if i could fit in. I could.

Stories on the news this morning that Colin McRae, 1995 World Rally Champion, has died in an helicopter crash. Normally when there's stories like that on the news i just think "great, but I wish they'd hurry up and get to the sports stories" but McRae was, in my opinion the greatest British sports star of all time. He was responsible for a massive increase in the interest in rallying in this country during the early 90s (something that ITV's poor WRC coverage seems to trying to kill off) due to his flat out driving style, often spectacular crashes and his personality outside of the car. On the day that he won the world championship I was in the Chester hotel where the official finish f the RAC rally was taking place - my uncle had been competing on the same event. Colin signed the shirt I was wearing .He'd just become World Champion and he had time to autograph the shirt of some geeky kid in the hotel lobby. I feel a little bit ashamed this morning that I no longer know where that shirt is. 
RIP

To repeat what a lot of people seem to be saying: Q Party was ace. Brilliant choice of venue, picking somewhere that I could buy Budweiser on tap. It was really good to catch up with everyone again. Years ago Dan was saying that one of his Mum’s friends was asked to describe Dan. She said that he was like Doreen, only more so. Having heard Dan’s mum’s speech I can see that’s right. And Claire’s dad’s poem would probably have been really moving if I wasn’t a really manly man that doesn’t show any emotion!

Thanks for inviting us guys, and congratulations, it’s great to see that you still obviously make each other really happy.

I was checking my emails this morning whilst there was a queue of people at my desk waiting for bus passes and I get one that says:

“Hey strokeyadam,

Your mutual friend scatmania has noticed that you last updated your journal on LiveJournal 6 weeks ago!  Be a friend and go post, at http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml

Sincerely,
The LiveJournal Team”

So I’m updating.

Doesn’t six weeks just fly by?

Emma and I have been looking at houses to buy in Daventry. We’ve made an offer on one that has been accepted and we’ve been to try and sort the mortgage out. The best deal that we seemed to be able to get was with the C and G. We paid the C and G £100 for the arrangement fee or whatever it was. So all that was sorted out and the house started to go through and there were lawyers and people doing whatever they do. Then the mortgage advisor ‘phoned us to say that the C and G wouldn’t do our mortgage. Which is shit. If anyone’s buying a house DO NOT USE CHELTENHAM AND GLOUCESTER. THEY WILL TAKE YOUR MONEY AND WASTE YOUR TIME. THEY’RE SHIT. We’re sorting another one out on Saturday morning before heading up to Preston for Q party.

Anyway, the house that we should be buying – if/when we can get the mortgage sorted is a two bed terrace, about 10 years old, on the other (nicer) side of the estate that we live on now.

So what else have I been doing in the last six weeks?

Well, looking at lots of houses.

We went to Aber for a few days and had a fire on the beach with the Qs and Paul and some other nice people whose names I can’t remember.

Then went to Prestatyn for a few days, which was nice.

Then we went to Blackpool and did all normal touristy things.

That’s all I’ve really got.

6 weeks of strokey’s life in just over 300 words.

I had to stop on the way to work this morning cos there was a cow in the middle of the road. 
I came round a bend and thought "Shit, that's a big dog" and then realised that the big dog had an udder and looked suspicioulsy like a cow. 

Fantastic weekend at the British Grand Prix - Lewis Hamilton doing brilliantly to finish third (there seemed to be an air of disappointment that he didn't win - people's expectations being far too high of a driver that is in his first season). It was dry all weekend and strated raining just after we'd packed the tent up. 

Maybe "What are Moo doing there" would have been a better title for the post

So once again I've managed to thumb down and jump on a passing bandwagon and started a face book account. Unfortunately, this is a website that is blocked on work's computers. So I'll have to check it at home and it won't fill the empty hours that take up most of my working week. 
There are a couple of things with it that I don't understand like: 

• what does poking someone do? (on facebook, obviously - I'm well aware that if i just poke someone on the street I'm likely to be met with a rather angry reaction)
• can you look at someone's profile if they're not your friend (so that when you search by name and there are loads of people with the same name you can see if it's the person that you're looking for and not a random stranger)?

There's still things on Live Journal that I don't understand how to do and I've been using this for years. 

Me Mum and Dad came to Daventry to visit last week. They seemed genuinely surprised that I was able to make a full english breakfast for them - what do they think I've been eating? 

I went to see Meat Loaf at the NEC last night. It’s the third time I’ve seen him live and (the venue aside – a bus to get from the car park to the arena? What’s wrong with building a multi-storey right next to the hall? It’s not like they have to worry about making Birmingham look ugly) I think it was probably the best performance I’ve seen. He didn’t sing ‘Modern Girl’, but that was to be expected cos he didn’t sing it either of the other times I’ve seen him and it’s the 3 Bats tour and Modern Girl’s not on a Bat album. But the songs of the new album were done really well, particularly ‘Bad for Good’ and there’s still something spine-tingling about hearing however many thousand people the NEC holds all singing ‘Bat out of Hell’ together.

My phone went off while they were singing Bat out of Hell as my mate Gerry sent me a message saying his wife had given birth to a little girl.