Empty jam and streetwalkers

I have had a number of people ask me for an update on my current health status so I shall start there today. I am struggling to beat Ms Nature down but, like any pigheaded man, I haven’t let that stop me.  Mornings and evenings are becoming more painful as the wrists seek to reduce my ‘window of operation’ and righty has remembered what fun it is to generate sharp spasms at random times.

Of course I have considered the increased levels of pain and the potential causes and consequences and arrived at a structured plan to rehabilitate. There are two facets to my plan, the first is to ignore any pain and the second is to increase the exercise. My approach has yet to yield improvements but I am confident that a good dose of stubborn will change that in due course.

In other news I think I experience cabbie jealousy over the weekend when picking up my children. Despite several attempts at conversation the driver was resolutely mute until my children got in the car, at which point he wouldn’t shut up. This was more than just conversation, I swear every time my daughter opened her mouth he had to tell a better story, there was a definite case of “he is my friend”.

I would also like to share with you the insanity of tourists. On Sunday I watched as a couple slowly realised that there was no longer a rush to get their young child to the toilet, nothing unusual in that. They proceeded to change said child’s clothing and pack up the rest of their kit and at this point made an odd decision. They placed the wet, or more accurately soiled, clothes on the wall, I can’t fathom why. I can see that they didn’t want to take the dirty clothes home but what was the purpose in leaving them to dry? Were they hoping that when dry somebody would use them without realising? Or perhaps they just thought that such a wonderous thing as child sized denim would astound the locals and left them there for our ‘museum of the future’?

This brings me to rants of the week, the first is to the delightful grocery home delivery service. Part of my groceries last week was a bath mat set, you know the deal a bath mat and a toilet pedestal mat. When I unpacked I found just a bath mat, despite the packaging saying that it was ” two piece”. When I called the other side of the planet, hey why do it in England, they asked if I had received the item and I explained that I had received half of it. I will acknowledge that this was my mistake as the call centre apologised and said that they would refund half of the value. But I don’t have any need for half of a set I responded, indeed they were more than welcome to have the half back  but the problem was that technically I had received the item.

In the end my cell phone signal came to the rescue and dumped the call, when I called back,and regaled the new call centre person with my analogy regarding empty pots of jam having no value despite the pot technically being present, I was rewarded with a refund, in full no less.

The second rant is against UKIP, well actually all of the self-serving, leaching politicians and their street walking cronies. I have a postal vote, I exercised it on Saturday and the envelope which I carried, on that same day, to the post office was most obviously my vote. At this stage my selection is clearly complete so why on earth do you feel the need to assault me on the street? As a rational citizen of the country I have deliberated over the pool of hopeless, arrogant liars that I have to choose from and selected the one who makes my skin crawl the least. When you assault me in the street you change the leaderboard and make me want to remove my support from your particular cretin but the system does not allow me to.

If I open the envelope my vote spoils and my voice is not heard. I am under no illusion that my voice counts you understand but hell I have done my bit, I have selected my cretin so leave me alone. Take note of the comedy sized envelope labeled A or whatever it says and get the hell out of my way. Or perhaps I am misreading the whole scenario, I presumed that these people were simply ignoring the envelope but perhaps they were targeting me. Perhaps this was all some plan to spoil my vote? No, I think not, that would involve a level of intelligence way above that of a politician.

Diesel love and wet toes

Heading home yesterday evening I passed a friend who was heading in the opposite direction. What amused me about this encounter was that said friend looked slightly taken aback by seeing somebody he knew, his female companion did not seem so concerned. This morning I walked into the same friend travelling in the opposite direction, collar up, hat on and dark glasses. We exchanged the traditional “got to stop meeting like this” comment as you do and I continued on my way with a smile.

I’ve known this guy for years, he earns good money and is always happy. I don’t mean that he always smiles or that I only see him drunk I mean that he has a genuinely happy disposition. The thing is that he is also the guardian of a secret that society doesn’t want us to know, he is single. I often, very often, see him walking back past my place in the morning, the ‘walk of shame’ as it’s known. There is no shame of course, not from either party it’s all smiles.

All the stuff about needing somebody at home, companionship and the like is what people say to justify their position. The truth is that the least happy people I know are in relationships or the result of failed ones. I have a friend, a devout petrol head, who has brought a diesel car and he does the same; he is forever explaining how it “feels chipped” or is “just as fast”. The truth is that we don’t need a relationship to be happy but when we are in one we cover insecurity and unhappiness by telling the world how luck we are.

Sure people who are single occasionally wish they weren’t but people in relationships do it a lot more. If you add in the nightly manoeuvres of my pal I would suggest that the single people wouldn’t think about relationships ever after all has anybody ever actually loved a diesel?

In other news, after much deliberation, I have composed a long message and sent it to my estate agent of choice. There is nothing wrong with answering the questions that we produced over the weekend after all. I have no urgent need to pour hard earned money into a chance venue but equally I would be remiss not to evaluate options. There is no business urgency at the moment and there are still hurdles to overcome but it feels great to get a toe wet.

I also have an update on healing. They say that healing is all swings and roundabouts, you gain here and lose there. Some days you are in pain and some days not so much. At the moment, please don’t tell the phyiosterroist, it’s a pain phase. My wrists are doing their best to lock up in inappropriate positions and to wake me in the night. Shaking out the sleepy limbs produces a cacophony of sounds and resultant pain.

My shoulder has taken to slipping into whatever position it is that it doesn’t like when I am asleep and then punishing me for it when I awake. I get the feeling that Ms Nature is not a fan of the current exercise regime but frankly I don’t care. I have had positive feedback on the strength in my handshake and I am defeating jars with relative ease. These are tangible and physical results, real improvements in my life. On the flip side I struggle to lift a kettle without pain and tend to wince when putting a shirt on. If all that Ms Nature has is pain then she is on a hiding to nothing, note that I didn’t say I couldn’t tip a kettle just that it hurt.

Stupid or something to say?

What is it that causes our reporters to expand stories to such a level?

In this mornings headlines about HMV, the company has suspended its shares and called in the administrators and ‘jobs are at risk’ no shit Sherlock! I watched the article on troops being sent to some other arguing African state and fully expected them to ‘lives are at risk’ as we watched them load guns into trucks!

Is it a dumbing down or do these people get paid per word? Is it the same cause as the station announcers telling us that ‘platforms may be wet’ because of rain? I’m not against information being given but surely only when we need it? If it rains stuff gets wet, you don’t need to tell me but if you paint a white door frame white the ‘wet paint’ sign is a sensible precaution.

Is this Health and Safety at play? Or is it some equal opportunity thing where have to ensure that we address the half wits as well as the normal people? It strikes me that this is one of the reasons for over population, we are defeating natural selection if you don’t know that standing in the fast lane of the motorway is hazardous to your health then nature is trying to tell you something!

This seems to be a peculiarly British thing and I wonder if its because nature has been too kind to us, how would we cope with the venomous spiders of Australia for example? A sign attached to every spider web ‘caution may contain spiders’ or would we have to spray them all orange?

As a final example whilst the issue of nut allergy is a serious one why do we need to apply the ‘may contain nuts’ label to bags of nuts? Surely this is obvious? Why don’t we apply a label saying ‘does not contain penguins’? Allow me to suggest that ‘may contain nuts’ is a more appropriate label for the label makers, the health and safety and those bloody station announcers!