I’m still alive! I dread to think how many kittens have died as a result of my negligence in the blogging department of late, but I’ve been rather preoccupied. Shall we have an update on my exciting life, which includes archerying, vehicular purchaseification, and television stardom? Well okay then.

I bought a new car - I forget what it is now, it’s one of the ones with four wheels and an engine. But I can’t drive it until it’s been taxed, and it can’t be taxed until the insurance certificate has arrived, which it hasn’t, so for the moment I’m borrowing my mum’s car. Which works out well, because she’s spending the week at CenterParcs with my dad, my sister and her menagerie, so she wouldn’t be using it anyway.

Due to their CenterParcsification, it was incumbent on Jess and I to look after the cats, so we’re spending the week in Leicesecestershire. Looking after my mum’s cats is no small matter - they’re on approximately five zillion forms of medication, and the instructions comprise two sheets of A4, both more or less full of text in about point 8 font, colour coded and cross referenced. So far we’ve neither crashed her car or killed any of the cats, so it’s going pretty well. We did break an umbrella, but we’re going to glue that back together before she comes home, so she’ll never know. Until she reads this, obviously.

The aforementioned family members presently in residence at CenterParcs are there as VIP guests for ten zillion squillion quids a day, which buys you a chalet bigger than Wales and two free passes for any acquaintances who might wish to pay you a visit. So yesterday myself and the lovely Jess had an exciting day out at CenterParcs, and I shall proceed to tell you all about it in the next paragraph, which will come immediately after this sentence, which is going to end right after the word ‘triumvirate’.

CenterParcs is great! We done field archery, and I was brilliant at it, and don’t let Jess tell you otherwise just because she scored 14 and I only scored 4. Low scores are better, like in golf. Maybe. And we hot tubbed and steam roomed and played in the pool which was brilliant and had an ace wave machine and sprinkly thing and a great big swirly slide except that was closed for maintenance so we didn’t get to go on it but we had so much fun we’re going to use up the second free pass tomorrow and we shall go on the great big swirly slide then and it shall be brilliant and go wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Oh and we bought some fudge and jelly bellies and the BIGGEST LOLLIES IN THE WORLD. And they’re yummy.

And finally, I’m going to be on telly! The BBC are doing some science programme that they need a cartoonist for (because obviously cartoonyology is one of the great sciences) and they asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said I will if you give me ten zillion squillion quids, and they said okay then, and so I’m going to do it. It’s a bit of a trek, because I’ve got to take Jess home to Lancashire on Sunday, and the telly thingy’s down in Wiltshire on Monday. Which could be a problem, because I imagine my mum will want her car back then, and if the insurance certificate for my new car doesn’t come in tomorrow’s post it’s looking unlikely that it’s going to get taxed in time, so I’ll have to go there by camel or something.

And that’s what’s happening in my exciting life.

As I predicted yesterday was likely to happen at some point, the nice people who lent me my courtesy car have decided they want it back. They’re coming to get it in the morning, rendering me a mere pedestrian. Luckily I don’t really need to go anywhere for the remainder of this week, and next week my parents are away, so I can pinch my mum’s car for the duration. All of which buys me a bit of time, but what it doesn’t buy me is a new car.

It sounds like it’s going to be uneconomical to buy back my written-off wreck from the insurance people and get it fixed on the cheap by a kid in a Taiwanese sweatshop, so it looks as though I’m in the market for new vehicular transportation. I’m thinking of going for a chauffeur driven limo, but the fact that I haven’t got much money could be an obstacle there.

Elsewhere in the news… actually I don’t think there is any other news. It’s been a very uneventful day.

I’m home! My long weekend up north consisted mostly of cinemaing, drawing, eating sweeties while Jess revised, and having crazy soap fights. Which raises an important issue that you and I need to talk about.

Everyone, at one time or another, gets soap in their ear. If you have crazy soap fights, it happens frequently, and I got to wondering where it all goes. If you get soap up your nose, no doubt it can be relied on to work its way out through your nasal passages, but if you get it in your ear there’s really nowhere for it to go except the brain. When I raised this concern with Jess she insisted that it magically gets turned into earwax, but I’m sure you’ll agree with me that that’s pretty silly. But my worry is that when you take into account the amount of soap that must make its way into the average person’s head in a lifetime, there can’t be much space left for anything else, and old people’s brains must be made entirely out of soap. That can’t be healthy, surely? It’s no wonder people become a bit forgetful in old age.

And that’s another thing. How come people with medical conditions named after them always have interesting-sounding names, like Alzheimer or Tourette? You’d think there’d be hundreds of unrelated ailments called Smith’s Disease or Jones’s Syndrome, but are there? No, there aren’t. It doesn’t make any sense.

Meanwhile, my car’s officially been written off. I intend to hold onto the courtesy car for as long as I can, but I presume they’re going to want it back at some point, which will make my weekend visits to Lancashire awfully inconvenient until I get another one sorted out. I’ve always got my bicycle, I suppose, but I’d have to pedal jolly fast, and I’d be putting myself in serious danger of getting fit. I’m not sure that that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

What I forgot to mention yesterday, having become preoccupied with sheep, was that I got my car back from the garage in full working order and it didn’t even cost that much. Which meant it was all ready to be picked up this morning to have the dent removed.

That all occurred without incident, and I was provided with a lovely courtesy car in its place. Then a bit later they phoned me up to let me know what was going on.

Apparently they reckon that removing the dent would cost more than a new car, so it’s probably going to be written off. I told this to someone who’s been in the same situation, and she said that when it happened to her, the insurance people paid her the full price of the car; she then bought it back off them for a few hundred quids and got it more or less repaired on the cheap, leaving her with a car that didn’t have anything wrong with it unless you looked closely, and a big fat wodge of cash. So if I’m lucky I might actually make a profit out of this.

Meanwhile, my efforts to relocate the dressing up game to midweek don’t seem to be working very well. It’s been suggested that we sacrifice the dressing-up-against-the-clock element of the contest and schedule them to last all week, or else that I spring them at unscheduled times whenever there happen to be a lot of people in the chatroom. Both options are being mulled over by the board, and no doubt there will be an announcement in due course.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say today. I’m tootling off tomorrow in my lovely courtesy car for a long weekend up north. We’ll rendezvous back here on Tuesday, shall we? Splendid, I’ll see you then, then.

Today I went for a lovely walk across the fields at the back of the village. I went for the same walk yesterday, on which occasion I met something in the region of five to ten million sheep.

As I passed through their fields, I did my best to engage them in polite conversation, but by and large they didn’t want to know. Mostly they ran away as I approached - in the case of the lambs, for it’s that time of year, they invariably made a beeline (sheepline? One or the other) for their mother, and attached themselves to her udder. Apparently sucking a teat is the only activity that can provide solace after the trauma of being walked past by me.

But there was one lamb which showed no fear. On the contrary, it found me of considerable interest, and took great delight in walking around and between my legs as though I were some sort of human obstacle course. I let it amuse itself in this manner for a time, and then continued on my way.

Today, as I intimated in my opening sentence, I repeated the course. This time the lamb which had befriended me on the previous occasion spotted me from some distance off and came running up, recognising an old chum when it saw one. It went straight into its leg-circling routine, and I gave it a couple of friendly pats.

That was when its mum saw me.

The look in her eyes was ferocious. She glared at me with an expression of pure hatred, and a clear, unspoken threat that if I didn’t step away from her infant this second, she would make my life a living hell.

She actually bared her teeth. I’ve never seen a sheep bare its teeth before.

The level of emotion she displayed, and the amount of unmistakable communication that took place between us, was far more than I supposed these rather stupid ruminants to be capable of. I didn’t fancy my chances if she opted to devote the rest of her life to making a misery of mine, and it seemed imprudent to chance it. So I left sharpish, hoping that she wouldn’t take the matter any further.

I think I got away with it. But now, every time I turn around, I half expect to come face to face with an angry sheep holding a snickersnee. I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight.

No news on when my car’s going to be fixed yet. I ambled across the street to the garage around lunchtime to see how the chap who’s dealing with it was getting on - he seemed to be getting on very well with eating his sandwich, but it wasn’t immediately clear how vehicular fixification was progressing, so I asked him.

“I’ve replaced the glow plug,” he said.

“Hurrah!” I said.

“But it still doesn’t work,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“No idea why,” he said.

“Oh no! This is a disaster! What am I going to do?” I said.

“I reckon I’ll have it fixed in an hour,” he said.

How he was able to even approximate how long it would take to fix when he didn’t know what was wrong with it puzzled me somewhat, but I left it with him. I haven’t heard from him since, so either it’s taking longer than an hour, or he’s still having his lunch. Still, he seemed pretty confident that it would be sorted in time to be taken away to have the dent removed on Thursday, and therefore, more importantly, I’ll have a car to drive up north in at the weekend (not mine, obviously - that will be having its dent removed - but I’ll get a lovely courtesy car from the insurance people for the duration).

It occurred to me earlier just how very marvellous it is that I migrate north every weekend (except for when the farm’s occupied, of course, in which case I migrate north and then immediately back south). Mostly it’s marvellous because I get to see my lovely Jess, but that isn’t the only reason. When you work from home like wot I do, you see, you tend not to work very regular hours - it’s currently two o’clock in the morning, and I’ll be doing a bit more work once I’ve finished writing this, to take a case in point - and every day of the week becomes much the same as the others, including Saturday and Sunday. Which is all very well, and I was perfectly happy back when weekends were barely distinguishable from weekdays, but it is nice to break things up a bit. Structure, that’s what you need. Good for the jolly old sanity, don’t you know.

It’s a good life, really. I have both the best job and the best girlfriend in the entire world, and when you consider that things were altogether less full of sunshine and light a twelvemonth ago, when I had neither of those things and lived in a Travel Inn… well, it just goes to show, really. I’m not entirely sure what it goes to show, but it’s something inspirational, no doubt.

The saga of my car is getting complicated.

Back in January a man in a van smashed into the side of it, giving me a lovely dent. I arranged with the insurance people to get it fixed, but then my clutch broke, rendering it immobile. They couldn’t very well take it away to fix the dent if they couldn’t move it, so I postponed dent fixification until clutch fixification had occurred.

By that time, though, the insurance people had pointed out that I ought to have mentioned the points I acquired last year for speeding when I renewed my policy, and intimated that because I hadn’t, they might not handle the claim. So I put off rescheduling disendentification until that had been sorted out.

Eventually they got back to me and said that they were going to overlook the speeding thing and handle it anyway, so I set a date for them to take it away again. That date was this coming Thursday.

But now my glow plug has blown up and it’s immobile again. Unless it’s fixed in the next two days, I’ll have to postpone dent removal for the second time.

In an effort to stop that from happening, I wandered down to the garage today and arranged for them to come and pick up my car to sort out the glow plug issue. The next problem was that I remembered I’d got a doctor’s appointment this evening, but no way of getting there.

I was supposed to go for a check-up within a month of stem cell donation, but being quite rubbish I didn’t get round to making an appointment until recently. But now my car didn’t work, so how was I going to get to it? I tried calling my mum to find out if she’d be home early enough to give me a lift, but she wasn’t answering her phone. Eventually I got through, explained my predicament, and she abandoned her plan to pop to The Disney Store to purchase a Mickey Mouse for my nephew who’s getting all excited about his forthcoming trip to Disneyland, and whizzed home.

“Shall I take you, or lend you my car?” she asked, showing a remarkable willingness to put its fate in my hands again.

“You’d better stay here, for someone from the garage is due round at some point to pick my car up,” I said.

“Can you find the doctor’s surgery on your own?” she said.

“I don’t know!” I said. “And I’ve got to be there in five minutes!”

“I’d better give you a lift,” she said.

We leapt in the car and headed first of all to the garage, to let them know we were going out for a bit, so this would be a bad time to come round and look at my car.

“They just left!” cried the young lady at the garage. “They’re headed to your house RIGHT NOW!”

I jumped back in the car, informed my mum of this development, there was the sound of screeching rubber and we tore home, where we intercepted the chaps from the garage just as they were giving up and leaving. I tossed my car key at them and then we raced to the surgery. We were just on time.

After that, it all gets rather dull. The nurse took a blood sample, which someone will presumably analyse to ensure that I’m still alive, and we came home. I’ll pay a call on the garage tomorrow to find out when my car’s going to be fixed. I hope it’s by Thursday.

This weekend, Jess and I were in Leicesecesestershire again. On Saturday we hopped in my lovely car and paid a visit to Fluffy and Sam.

We had a splendid time doing such exciting things as making cookies, eating pizza, watching Monsters Inc and playing The Game of Peterborough, which is almost as much fun as it sounds. And then it was time to go home. But my car wouldn’t start.

I turned the key in the ignition. It made the noise cars make when they’re trying to start but failing. I tried again. The same thing happened. I tried again, for longer. Smoke started to come out of the engine. I stopped, quick.

We went back to the house and knocked on the door. Fluffy answered.

“Do you know anything about cars?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

Sam appeared.

“I’ll have a look at it,” he said.

He had a look at it.

“Your car’s broken,” he said.

We called the AA. Yes, again.

Apparently - concentrate, here comes the science part - one of my glow plugs has fallen out, or exploded, or whatever glow plugs do when they die. This isn’t a major problem - replacing a glow plug costs about tuppence. Unfortunately, a consequence of the glow plug dying is that something else has short circuited. How much it costs to replace a something else has yet to be established, but I imagine it will be more than tuppence.

The AA towed my car back to Leicesecesestershire, Jess and I hitching a ride in the truck. The way things are going at the minute, I think it would be cheaper all round if I abandoned my car altogether and just got the AA to give me a lift everywhere. I’ll suggest it to them and see what they think.

As far as I can establish - and this bit’s important - this latest incident is in no way my fault. No one seems to be able to think of any way I might be responsible for my glow plug going bang, so at present the evidence seems to be in favour of my mum’s theory that my car is cursed. Today she was brave or foolish enough to let me borrow her car to take Jess home. Miraculously, it’s still in one piece.

On the radio today Eammon Holmes was talking about his life in show business, and imparted a secret of the television world that I felt I should share.

“There’s only one sort of programmes. Good programmes and bad programmes.”

Okay, so it turns out Thursday isn’t a very good day for the dressing up game. Hardly anyone was around so we didn’t bother. I think we’ll try Wednesday next week and see if that’s any better.

A few weeks ago, when Jess and I were spending the weekend at the Goodway ancestral home, we got a box of games down from the attic. It turned out they were all a bit rubbish and we didn’t play any of them, and ever since, the box has been sitting on the floor and my mum’s occasionally been reminding me to put it away. Tonight I finally got around to doing it.

When I got it down, Jess was there to assist me, and with two people and gravity on our side it was a relatively simple task. Putting it back all on my own proved more of a challenge.

The first problem you encounter when you try to carry a big box of games up a ladder and through a little hatch is how to keep your balance. There was no way I could achieve a successful ascent without either holding onto the ladder or flapping my arms madly. You solve this by balancing the box on your two outstretched arms, which cling onto the sides of the ladder. It’s then just about possible to get up it.

The second problem arises as you near the top - due to the fact that you’ve got your arms outstretched with a box balancing on top of them, the rest of your body is quite some distance from the ladder. This means that your head isn’t underneath the hatch, and bangs on the ceiling. At this point you realise you’re a bit stuck.

What you do then is duck down under the box and balance it on your head. You can then continue upwards, shunting the box before you with your skull. But now you have to squeeze the box through the hatch, which is barely wider than it. The angle of the ladder means that the bottom of the box is some distance from the far end of the hatch, and as a consequence it will only go through at an angle. So you allow the box to fall flat against the ladder. That’s when about a million plastic balls fall out and go everywhere.

At that point you abandon all hope of completing your mission without casualties, and just give it a shove and hope for the best. Which, after a fashion, works.

And then you go back down the ladder and pick up all the plastic balls. It’s quite straightforward really.

My birthday has been and gone. Being the responsible chap that I am I spent most of it working, though by way of marking the occasion I did so concurrently with consuming vast quantities of Maltesers and Coca Cola. Then this evening I was treated to a trip to a pub with my parents to watch some morris dancers poncing about. I don’t think I can put into words how thrilled I was by this experience. Mainly because I wasn’t.

I didn’t get much in the way of presents, because a couple of months ago when I purchased a shiny new GPS I was experiencing one of my occasional financial crises, so I coerced my mum into paying for it as an early birthday present. That shiny new GPS, incidentally, is designed for in-car use, unsuitable for employment on foot, so whenever I’m a pedestrian I revert to my good old Garmin GPSMap 60C, which I now mainly use for geocaching and finding the car. Except now I don’t use it for anything at all, because it’s mysteriously vanished. Of course if I were to buy another one it would turn up immediately, and I don’t really get enough use out of it these days to justify the purchase in any case, but it can only be a matter of time before I mislay my car and never find it again at which point I’ll regret being so stingy. I give it a fortnight.

Oh, and while we’re on a completely different subject, I’ve muttered a few times about the fact that we never have a dressing up game now that I’m not around on Friday nights, and we really must change it to a different day. So this week I’m going to try changing it to Thursday. Which is today! So join us in the chatroom at 8PM for some dressing up fun and larks.

This afternoon, for no discernable reason, the memory of an incident that took place when I was about six bubbled to the top of my brain. Would you like me to share it with you? Yes, I thought you would.

At the time I had a mobile hanging over my bed. It consisted of a paper plate suspended from the ceiling by string, with six ping pong balls hanging from the perimeter, each with a clown’s face and a little paper cone on top to make a hat. I have a vague feeling that I made the thing myself, but that can’t be true because if I had it would have been rubbish, so I suspect that in reality one of my parents made it and I just “helped". But however it came about, I had these six clowns dangling in a circle over my bed.

One night, as I was lying there and failing to get to sleep, I stared up at my clowns and counted them. One, two, three, four, five, six. Everything seemed to be in order there. Then I counted the spaces between them. One, two, three, four, five, si… huh?

I was aware, even at that tender age, that when you put a lot of things in a row, the number of gaps between them should be one less than the number of things. But I apparently failed to appreciate the logic behind this, because I couldn’t see any reason why my clowns would be an exception to the rule.

The correct response would probably have been mild puzzlement, but I went into a bit of a panic. It didn’t make any sense! It was like I’d found two lots of two things which, when put together, added up to five things. Here was a fundamental mathematical truth being breached! Just imagine the consequences! Surely the universe couldn’t continue if basic numerical rules no longer applied? Surely this could only mark the end of life as we know it? Was this the first sign of the apocalypse? Were four horsemen about to descend from the skies, with four spaces between them?

With hindsight, I may have overreacted. I scweamed and I scweamed until my mummy came running, and I gave her the bad news about the imminent destruction of the universe. But instead of bursting into tears as I had expected, she explained that when the things that are in a row are in a circle, you get another space between the ones that would otherwise have been at the ends. I had to admit that she had a point.

So that was the end of that, really. But it just goes to show that clowns are the scariest things in the world and should on no account be allowed near impressionable young children. Unless it doesn’t go to show that at all, of course.

Ooh, lots of things to talk about today. But first, you’ll remember how back in March I aked those of you who want to come to Go Ape to fill in my lovely form telling me when you’re available, on the strength of which I proposed May 21st over in the forum, which people generally seemed quite happy with. I then got busy for two months and forgot all about it, and now that I have a free moment to think about it again it strikes me that May 21st actually isn’t all that far away. So really what I want to know is a) does that date still suit people, and b) how many of you are going to come? Then we can get round to booking and suchlike. So if you want to come, let me know, either in the comments or over in the forum thread I just linked to, or in the chatroom or by smoke signal or whatever you like.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s talk about more interesting things, shall we? In fact let’s have a picture of Mr Tiger and my brilliant pirate birthday card wot is made out of foam.

Aren’t they brilliant? See, I told you they were.

Meanwhile it’s very nearly my birthday, on the evening of which my parents are taking me to a pub to see some morris dancers. Because obviously I’m a big fan of morris dancing. Either that or my mum wants to go and I’m humouring her. I can’t help feeling that I should do something more than that to celebrate the occasion, but I don’t know what. So what I want you all to do is suggest suitably celebratory activities I can engage in on the day, and I shall attempt to do as many of them as possible. Maybe.

That’s assuming I’m still alive on my birthday, because this evening I was sat here nibbling a bar of chocolate I’d extracted from the bag of stuff I brought home from the farm a few weeks ago when Jess reminded me that the reason we hadn’t eaten it at the time was because it had been nibbled by Rodney the mouse. So I suppose I’m going to die of some hideous rodent disease now, or else develop a sudden craving for cheese and escape through a hole in the skirting board every time one of the cats enters the room.

Not that there are any holes in the skirting board, or the mouse my mum discovered the cats playing with in the dining room this evening would have vanished through one. I’d just finished toasting some hot cross buns for my supper when I was called upon to assist in catching him in a tupperware box before he was mutilated by a feline, so I abandoned my buns and joined in the hunt. Somewhat surprisingly, I succeeded in dropping the tupperware over his head, leaving my dad to release him in the field across the road. Even more surprisingly my hot cross buns were still hot. And the cats were pretty cross.

So that’s my day. How are things with you?

I really do seem to have lost the knack of blogging, don’t I. But you see I’ve had a very busy week.

Last Monday, of course, was a bank holiday, and as such was spent with my lovely Jess, and of course on Friday I went back up north to commence another exciting weekend with her. Meanwhile I’d arranged to meet up with my old chum MCL on Thursday, not having seen him for absolutely aaaages, all of which meant I only had two days to do a week’s work (except that MCL didn’t get here until 4 in the afternoon, but we’re overlooking that for the moment). Clearly that didn’t leave much time for anything else, so blogging went out the window a bit. But now I’m back! Hooray!

The weekend was of course absolutely fab, as they always are these days. Jess decided I could have my birthday present this Sunday, so at about one minute past midnight I opened it and it’s the bestest present ever! I’ve got a little mini fridge wot I can keep stuff in so I don’t have to go all the way downstairs when I want something cold, and a brilliant furry tiger who I’ve named Mr Tiger. I might change that to something else when I’ve got to know him well enough to decide what name would suit him, but for the time being I’m sticking with Mr Tiger. And he’s the best tiger ever.

And as if that wasn’t enough, she made me a fabby card with a pirate on! “Wow!” I expect you’re saying to yourself, or your cat, or your brilliant furry tiger, or whoever else happens to be in the vicinity. “That must be the best card ever!” And it is, too, but you haven’t heard the best part yet - the pirate is made out of FOAM! I bet you’ve never had a birthday card with a pirate made out of foam on it. Have you? No, you see, I was right. I told you she’s the best girlfriend ever.

This evening she informed me that some time recently I woke up in the night, turned to her, said “I just dreamt that Nanki-Poo was trying to kill me,” and promptly went back to sleep. I do dimly recall informing her of a dream I’d just had, but I’m quite certain it didn’t involve characters from The Mikado attempting to do me in, so I’ve been racking my brain to work out what I actually said, but thus far to no avail. Which is a pity, because I’d quite like to know who was trying to kill me. They might try to do it again.

It occurred to me that I haven’t had a birthday for a while, so I’ve decided to have one next Wednesday. In recognition of this event, my lovely Jess has bought me a present, which she’s showed me on webcam and it’s all wrapped up but it’s in a big box and it looks brilliant and I’m so excited and I can’t wait to open it and it’s going to be ACE! But we’ve got a bit of a dilemma.

Because I only get to see her at weekends, and next week Wednesday happens not to fall on a weekend. So should she give it to me the weekend before, or the weekend after?

Weekends starting, as they do, on Friday, and ending, as they also do, on Sunday, the weekend after would be closer to my birthday. But - and this is the important bit - I’m too excited and if I have to wait that long I might burst. And if she gives it to me the weekend before should I open it there and then or somehow summon up the will power to leave it sat unopened for three days?

These are the questions that must be answered. And they must be answered by YOU, because I certainly don’t know what to do.