Phew.  It's Sunday, I've slept past set-off-for-church time and I'm booked off work until Friday - smashing.  Last couple of months have been pretty busy, and the house STILL has boxes scattered throughout.  So this week I'm hoping to at least partially rectify that, and to perhaps take a few minutes to relax too if I'm lucky.  Since I last wrote here, I've cleared the front room of boxes, got a telephone number for the house, got the internet, got Sky (the God channel is fantastic - Joyce Meyer : fantastic) and brilliantly bought a pair of cream leather sofas - ooo they're a bit sexy!

 

Last night was Corene's 29th birthday bash.  Bit of a murder mystery evening.  A pretty good night all round, I'd say (if you were asking, anyway, but I realise you're not).  Snapped a few photos, and because I'm a famous international boxer, have decided to share them with you on this 'ere site.  You lucky gets.

 

Haven't quite got the calendar in order yet, but possible up-coming joys are Jenny Harker's birthday bash in December, various possibilities with Robin as soon as I get my act together, maybe in the new year a celebration of my 30th birthday (it happened in September, but I was too busy to want to arrange any celebrations).  Of course, before that, there's Christmas, which has come a bit fast again.  Perhaps if I ignore it, it will go away?

Morning hairy people, evening baldies.  Well, a lot of you know this already, but it's probably high time I announced it verbally using this here blog.  I've bought a house.  And moved into it.  And moved out of the other one.  In that order.  So, this has important consequences regarding my phone number.  It's strictly mobile phone only at the moment, until I arrange something (probably with NTL).  Equally frighteneningly this means I don't presently have any kind of internet access at home, and while it doesn't logically derive, it's also true that I have absolutely no television reception whatsoever.  Don't worry - that sympathetic pang you just felt was just a natural part of being human.  It turns out that polystyrene doesn't experience that at all.  I know - there goes another pang.  Poor old polystyrene.

 

So, it's a one bedroom wonder in a neighbouring town equipped with Argos, and is currently packed with cardboard boxes all (metaphorically) crying out, "Declutter", "Declutter".  So, while visitors are always welcome, you might want to come in small groups for the time-being.  Tom's mum has been kind enough to lend me two folding chairs to compensate for my absense of sofa.  Another pang, there.  Nice.

 

Oh, and Tom came over the other week.  It was supposed to be a social visit, but instead he helped me move all my furniture to the new house (or in some cases the dump).  He's a nice fella like that.  We hired a van.  I tried to drive it, but it was designed in such a way that there was no way that I could adjust the seat to a position that didn't cause me constant pain in the accelerator foot whilst driving.  So after my first journey, Tom took over.  He found he could position himself in a painless position, providing he ensured he could only just reach the steering wheel.  That's a Volkswagon van.  And VW reckon they're good.  But they're not, clearly.

 

So, being a brilliantly prepared individual, come my last day of house rental I was driving back and forth between the houses in my little Micra until about 5:30am in the morning.  Went to bed at 6:15am, setting the alarm for 7:00am to make sure I got to work okay.  Ooops.  Thankfully, my boss also does pangs, and let me take a days holiday...

 

 

A quote from Phil King there - a true monkey genius.

 

Today, I sorted out the front page of

so it looks pretty and gives easy access to that ancient (and quite large) photo album.

 

And I'm quite pleased with it too.

Yes, it's taken me a while as usual.  I'll quickly ruffle my memory and give you some highlights of what's been going lately...

 

- Darren and Lorraine got married

- Tom came to visit

- So did Tony T. and Linzi

- So did my dad

- I went to see my bro and his wife

- My bro's wife gave birth to a boy named Caleb, thus making me an Uncle

- Some other news that I'm not going to put on the web for the time being

- Corene has had her knee operated on

- Me and some of the guys from work went to London to compete in Puzzler Magazine's annual quiz, and probably came second to last or something.

- I went to see "Confetti" (the film) in Cambridge last night with Mike from work, and thought it was very good.  We finished off with a rather smashing visit to the Lucky Star chinese restaurant, who do a pretty smashing all-you-can-eat buffet for not actually all that much money per head.

 

Some of the above events are beautifully depicted in the four new photo albums I've just uploaded.  FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (do not listen to them under any circumstances).

 

So there it is.  Enjoy your afternoon, if it's evening, then well done - that's the afternoon blown already, and if it's morning, stop getting ahead of yourself.

 

Big hugs,

Phil

Well, it's Monday, and it's been an interesting weekend.  Tony T. and Linzi came over on Friday night and stayed until late Sunday afternoon.  T. managed to break all records in getting down here from Nelson - 7 hours!  To be fair he was struggling with his satellite navigation thing, and I think that confused things a tad.  Hopefully their journey back was a little more successfull!

 

It was good to see them, obviously.  Didn't really get up to all that much.  Took Linz for a tootle around St. Ives while T. did some business-work on the computer, and we took a brief trip to Huntingdon.  T. bravely shaved his hair off to a number 2, after I gave him a pretty awful artist's impression of what it'd look like on Paintshop Pro.  Looks pretty good.  And we took ourselves to Colne (Cambridgeshire) and had a meal at The Green Man - a cute little pub I'd spotted when Tom visited previously.  The general consensus was that we'd not had such a terrible pub meal in a long, long time.  Yuck!  And not particularly cheap either.  And we watched lots of Vic & Bob, Nathan Barley and a couple of films.  Up until 3am-ish both nights, and strangely I coped fine!  V. odd.

 

Two second film reviews from the weekend:

"The Rage in Placid Lake" - A good little comedy, that none of us had heard of.  We all liked it.  Shame our copy had a glitch and we had to skip a chapter, though.

"Domino" - Admitedly we were all a bit tired, but T. and Linz were heard to mutter words like "crap" and I think T. suggested it might be the worst film he'd ever seen.  I was particularly tired when I was watching it, and couldn't keep pace with the plot at all.  It didn't grab me really.  Think it was one of those films where the start of the film re-appears at the end.  And there was lots of re-referencing of pretentious voice-overs throughout the film.  My feeling was that the film was probably style over substance, and that I didn't particularly like the style!

Just got back from the Cambridge performance of The Mighty Boosh.  In all honesty I think that the Peterborough one was better.  Might be that it was all fresh for me that time, but certainly the Cambridge Corn Exchange is a little bit small.  And I didn't have a 2nd row seat this time.  Went with Mike from work and his brother Richard.  We did the creepy lurking around thing again at the end, and met the cast.  Didn't quite catch Mike (Nabu) - he dashed off relatively quickly.  I think Noel (Vince) and Rich (Bob Fossil) share the crown for being really rather friendly.  Oh, and the two performances did vary in quite a few minor details - there's a fair amount of improvisation going on really.  As a bonus, met Sarah (our sarnie delivery girl at work) out for the night.  Don't know how she spotted me in the crowds, but she did.  She's a clever 'un.

Well, it had to happen.  Tonight I went to see The Mighty Boosh do their thing in Peterborough.  They did a cracking job, as you might expect - smashing.  And whilst a little bit naughtier than the TV version, not tremendously, which was nice.  Second row as well.  Good for photographs (well, everyone seemed to be taking them, so why not me as well, eh?).

 

Went with my Peter from church (cheeky 17 year old fella), and sat with Andy & Jenny King and Darren and Lorraine.  For some reason, at the end they all went home, leaving me & Peter to do the "lurking behind the the theatre in the hope of meeting some of the cast" trick.  And would you believe... it actually worked.  We met pretty much everyone except the fella who plays Bollo.  And they were all dead nice, and made plenty of time for us hassling fans.  Anyway - check the photos.  Yup, that's me & Vince (or Noel or whatever).  I was strangely un-star-struck, but Pete was quite excitable.  How old am I, eh?  Duufff.