Tag: Family

Quickie.

Just to say the Beth lasted all of one Kung Fu lesson! She went, loved it, then cried off the next lesson citing lack of money. I’ve told her the offer is still open. I went to the second class and Sifu was having a self-defence lesson, specifically how to deal with knife attacks. You grab the attacking arm, grip the hand that is holding the knife, elbow them in the face, carry it through so the knife cuts their throat, reverse their hand then gut them. Ohhhhhh K. So that was fun. He explained that way you are never losing control of the hand holding the knife and, as an added bonus, never putting finger prints on the knife. If you’ve just cut someone’s throat then lent into them (to stab into their guts) you’re going to be covered in blood anyway, so the finger prints might be superfluous. Technicalities. If someone has just tried to attack you with lethal intent the first priority is stopping them. Legality comes a very distant second. So that was what Beth missed. Good, clean fun. Also, whilst I’m here I should mention an incident from last week. (I mentioned it on Twitter but omitted it from my last blog.) Wendy, her brother (Pete), his wife (Emma) and I(Buck!), went to see Avatar 3D at the local flicks. Which I should mention in passing was rather spiffy, first good 3D I’ve seen. Plot was massively predictable, but really well done. Anywho, it was still in the midst of the snow and ice. I gave  Pete and Emma a lift to the flicks. Apparently they really are gay about my driving! All the slipping and sliding, which I thought was fun, was a bit unsettling for them. After I’d dropped them off and they were self medicating with stiff drinks, Wendy and I came home. I was chugging up to the lights on Cromwell ave which were on green, so I put my foot down to make it, then, as I had to do a right turn through the lights, went to brake. Not a bloody sausage. Micra locked up, slithering all over the place. I said to Wendy "We’re going to crash, sorry." Then by some miracle of mighty Micra mastery, I managed to save it! That was a hell of a rush. More so for Wendy, I suspect. I returned to my sax lesson. Hate it. Wish I could just get the basics down so I can quit the lessons for a while and learn by practising all the songs I like. That will be more fun and less pressure. Damn these baby steps I am forced to take! I did a work out at home yesterday, my first for two months, and how it shows! My tendons were a foot shorter! I ended up totally done in, and today my legs are really sore. Then to add to my joy I had another headache. I woke up with a bit of […]

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New Year!

Momentous milestones! We’ve all made it into 2010, it’s my first blog entry of the year and my one hundredth entry on MySpace. Welcome to the new century! I thought I’d summarise 2009, as pertains to Wendy and me, but first let me tell about last night. Our neighbours, who, in fairness, rarely hold parties, told us they were having one on New Years Eve. Fair do’s again, if you can’t party in the new year, when can you? Then they said they’d hired a DJ! A feckin’ DJ! Ours is a block of three houses, this neighbour is the one in the middle, so to all intents and purposes is in a terraced house. And they were hiring a DJ. So we expected loud, and as they are into their cocaine, we expected it to go on a bit. Happily Wendy’s brother, Peter, invited us around to see in the new year. This was welcome as Wendy gets really stressed out about noise nowadays. We set off to Pete’s and Emma’s (his wife) at about eleven pm. (The ability to jump in the car whenever we feel like and the feeling of moral superiority are the best consolations for not drinking!) We came home at about half past three, and next door were still at it! We went to bed by four am, and the music was only quiet, but because they were all coked up they were unaware of how loud they were being every time they went outside for a fag. After a fitful sleep we got up at twelve noon and they were still going! Respect to the quality of the product, but shit! They started to disperse before one in the afternoon, now all is quiet. We are tired and a bit miffed with them, but in the small mercies column, it’s only the fact that my day off happened to fall today that stopped me from having to get up at ten to five this morning. OK, whinge over, back to the review. Let me paint a word picture of this time last year; I was working in the De-kit department, I was still paying for training towards my HGV class II license having already failed the test two or three times, I was training in Taekwondo and Kung Fu but was having to decide between them because we were so poor, Wendy was still a volunteer at the Citizens Advice Bureau and we were unmarried. Phew, how times change! In January I passed my class II, to the relief and surprise of many. Then over the year I set about the class I (articulated lorry) training and tests. Many tests. There was the moment of high drama when it looked like we had run out of credit and I still hadn’t passed, then miraculously the credit card doubled our limit unbidden. (God bless those unscrupulous bastards!) Finally, in July, I passed. The relief has never been so great! £ 5,615 to get both […]

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Day off.

It was my day off today. Huzzah! I’m on my 6-2 week, so it was rather lovely to have a lie in. I get knackered getting up at five in the morning so was going to have a lengthy lie-in. This was not to be. My nan had taken a funny turn and was in hospital so I visited her on Tuesday. She looked all frail and done-in and confused. I felt sad for her. Then it transpired that my mam and dad were going away on holiday (yesterday) and my sister and her husband were away until this weekend. So my nan would be shipped back to her flat and not have them to attend her as they usually do. Usually I avoid all unnecessary contact with people. I find people to be like salt; pleasant in moderation, unpalatable in excess. It’s a selfish, anti-social, and in all honesty fairly loathsome trait. Yet one that affords me a quiet life. Buddha would be quick to point out the ‘me’ in that sentence. To cut to somewhere near the chase, I said I’d pop round yesterday to make sure she wasn’t short of anything. It turns out she lives in old codger paradise. It’s a series of flats built around an enclosed complex. Shops, hairdressers, library, internet cafe, all under one roof. All carpeted, with wheel-chair and scooter access, carers all about, wheelchair friendly lifts, and bedecked with doddering denizens. Back in her natural environment my nan was fairly compos mentis, still not to hot on her feet mind, but not the pitiful, confused patient from the hospital. She thought she had been diddled with her bank account and was saying that when my mam came back off holiday she would get a lift to Birchwood (about five miles away) to her local branch. It being my day off today I said I’d take her, but that I had a sax lesson at two in the afternoon so it would have to be in the morning. I suggested eleven o’clock she said ten thirty, then we could go to Asda and get some lunch! Bloody hell. No good deed goes unpunished (Oscar Wilde). So I had to get up at half eight, get the washing out, straight to Asda to do our big shop for the week, charge back, unpack, round to my nan’s (late) where she was waiting for me in the foyer (!) back up to her flat so she could change wheelchairs and dither about, then bank, (where she tried to give me loads of money and I refused) charity shop, (where she had a moan at the woman she knows there about me not taking the money she wanted to give me)  Asda and cafe. I said I didn’t want anything to eat, just a coffee. She pointed to a big roast of meat and asked what it was (turns out it was turkey) and said it looked nice, what was I having? I said just […]

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Evil Lisa!

I forgot to say, we went around to my sisters house last Sunday. She is a bit of an evil genius at the making of puddings. If you think of the artistry of Gary Rhodes, the relish of Nigella Lawson, and the to-hell-with-the-calories of the Two Fat Ladies, you are in the right area. Add a soupcon of talking snake and you’ve got it. With one pudding she managed to break two diets. I love my sweet stuff so I piled straight in, but Wendy was saying ‘perhaps I’ll have a spoonful out of one’. Lisa, gave her a bowl (they were already made up into little bowls) and after the first spoonful, even though she was full, Wendy was eating the lot. I was half way through my bowl, in an ecstasy of creamy goodness, when our Lisa started talking about the problem she’d had with the jelly. Bugger! Jelly =gelatine =animal product. I’m a veggie. I paused, spoon laden with calorific sublimity, then thought ‘well I’ve already eaten some. Screw the animals’, and troughed the lot. Bad Bucky! Buddha demerits. Which is a recurring ethical problem. I have leather goods, I use slug pellets and pesticides, yet I want to be a veggie. At what point does a life inherit value? Buddha says not to take any life, as we are all indistinguishably one. But would he not have boiled dirty water? It’s a dilemma, but it’s bedtime. Later, Buck.

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Socialising my arse!

Hi, We have just returned from Wendy’s sister’s (Gail). That was eventful. Wendy’s brother and his wife (Peter and Emma) came with us in the mighty Micra to the outskirts of Brum. Some people claim that Daventry, being a further fifty miles down the country, is not actually in Birmingham. To these geographical pedants we merely say: well you’re not going to admit you live in Brum, are you? So, first the journey there. Four of us in the Micra. It’s only a 1000cc engine, with 90,000 miles on the clock, no air conditioning, the mechanism on one of the windows is knackered and it was a mad hot day. A recipe for joy in that simple description. Also, unbeknownst to us when we arranged it, we had chosen to go on the same weekend  they were hosting the flower show at Birmingham NEC, which was plugged ceaselessly on (may I say in passing, the best for a long time) Gardeners World the night before. When we finally got clear of the weirdness of the jams (come to a complete stop, then speed up to.., seventy miles an hour, m’lud. Yet at no point did we come across a cause for the stopping.) obviously I put the Micra into the sports setting (I shut the drivers door window) and went for it. You’ll believe a Micra can fly. That was a relief. Then they closed the road, sending us on a huge diversion that left us in the middle of nowhere. The Bullring is lovely at this time of year so we whiled away the time waiting for Gail to send her beau to come and find us. When we got there there were all the usual antics of family get-togethers; the beer, the small talk to partners you don’t know, the herds of kids, etc. It went quite well (there were no fights, nobody died, we are all still talking to each other) and Gail, bless her, pulled out all the stops to accommodate us, and trying to make bbq food for a veggie is, to be honest, about as far as sanity and civility can be pushed. But you know how it is, you want your own bed and a complete absence of noise, social interaction and children. (Or is that just me?) To be fair, Gail’s young ‘un, Brett, was fine, a sterling youth. I expect the others were, individually, upstanding pillars of juvenile rectitude, but en masse they blend into a mob, one video game short of barbarity, anarchy and possibly cannibalism. (Again, it is possible that that is just my non-paternal impression.) We made it, none the less. Also it strikes me; perchance I should adopt a personal pronoun (to avoid erroneous inference being drawn from my ramblings.) Me. myself, and I. In other news, I am back on the pick now. I have my rota (every other weekend off, woo-hoo!) and am achieving my pick figure without any problems. If I can just stay […]

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