I forgot to go to bed last night, so I’m not terribly conscious now, but I’ve just managed to stay awake long enough to oversee the voting on this year’s pumpkin carving competition, and the winner is… well, see for yourselves.

I’ve got a feeling there was one other thing I wanted to tell you all about, which may possibly have been Quite Important, so let me see if I can dredge it from this muddy foggy thing that used to be my brain.

Er…

Nope, it’s gone. I’ll tell you tomorrow if I can remember.

So I’ve been up north for a long weekend, and tonight - the night just gone, that is - the time had come to part from my lovely Jess. I left her house at twenty past ten - I knew it was twenty past ten, because that was the time on my laptop, which she’s got at her house for the moment on account of her PC being knackered - though it seemed that whoever was responsible for putting back the clocks in her house had neglected their duty, because all of the others said it was twenty past eleven - and I rolled up in the drive of Goodway Mansions a mere two hours and twenty-five minutes later.

So I was a bit confused to discover, when I entered the house, that it was now getting on for two o’clock. I switched on my brain and let it churn for a bit, and eventually worked out that for some unknown reason the laptop had seen fit to put itself back by two hours instead of the more traditional one. Which meant that I’d had another extra hour of weekend on top of the one I’d have got anyway, so that was fine by me.

But whatever the exact time, it’s now most definitely Hallowe’en, so I would like to say two things. The first thing I would like to say is “Wooooooo!” in a scary voice, and then, once I’ve terrified you to the very depth of your soul, I’d like to remind you to carve a pumpkin and send me a picture of it, and then join us in the chatroom this evening for the exciting vote. The entries I’ve been sent so far are all jolly splendid, but I know that YOU can do better. Or can you? Well, no, probably not.

Hmm, the majority of you seem to share Jess’s rather bizarre eating habits. I had no idea my blog was read by so many weirdos - I wouldn’t have put the question to you if I’d known you were going to side with her. Oh well, I take solace in the knowledge that I won our argument about whether characters on Sesame Street qualify as muppets.

I don’t have much else to tell you tonight, except that we carved our pumpkins today and they look brilliant, and that she hasn’t died of pneumonia yet. I think we might be heading up north tomorrow, so this may be the last time you hear from me until next week, but it equally well might not be so I won’t say goodbye.

And, um… that’s more or less your lot, I think. Nice weather for the time of year, ain’t it?

It occurs to me that I ought to spell out how the pumpkin competition works for those of you who weren’t around last year. You all carve pumpkins, email photos of them to me, and on the night of Hallowe’e'e’en I bung them all in my gallery and get everyone in the chatroom at the time to vote on the winner. The winner wins nothing, but anyone who doesn’t enter is eaten by a brain-eating zombie. That’s it, really. It’s not complicated, I just thought I should keep mentioning it so you don’t forget, and that seemed as good a pretext for bringing it up as anything.

Now down to the important business of the day. Jess and I have been arguing about bread rolls, hot cross buns, and other bread-based products of that nature. There is strong disagreement between us as to whose method of eating such things is the normal one that everyone else in the whole world does, and whose is the completely weird way that marks them out as a loony. I therefore propose to describe the two approaches to you, the viewing public, and you can reveal your own preference in the comments. Then we’ll see who’s the freaky weirdo.

Imagine, then, a roll or bun, possibly toasted or grilled, cut through the middle in the traditional manner and spread with butter or some substitute so similar in taste and texture to that product that you can’t believe it isn’t. Having applied the spread to both halves, do you a) put them back together and eat it like a sandwich as any normal, sane person who hasn’t plugged their brain in upside down would do, or do you b) eat both halves separately, one after the other, like some sort of deranged lunatic who’s worked out how to unbuckle their straightjacket?

As a consequence of lovefilm having just posted us the last three DVDs in the most recent series, as well as the debut of exciting spin-off Torchwood, we’re having a bit of a Doctor Who themed week, Jess and I. It’s therefore fitting that this evening we travelled to the Nottingham Theatre Royal to see seventh doctor Sylvester McCoy in Me and My Girl. It was awfully good, but we very nearly didn’t make it.

We set off in plenty of time - the journey was only supposed to take fifty minutes or so, and we left two hours before the curtain was due to rise. The first problem we had was congestion on the M1, which added significantly to the length of the journey, and by the time we reached our destination there was just half an hour to spare. Which would have been ample, but that the destination we’d reached was manifestly not the destination we wanted.

Investigation revealed that although I had correctly instructed the GPS to guide us to - oh, I can’t remember what it was called, let’s say Flurgleburgle Street - I hadn’t exhibited a sufficient degree of care in ensuring that it was the right Flurgleburgle Street. It appeared that the contraption had no knowledge of the Flurgleburgle Street in Nottingham town centre, but knew all about another Flurgleburgle Street, which it purported to be in Nottingham, but which was in fact in Derbyshire.

We had 30 minutes to spare. I quickly set a course for the correct location. The GPS told me it would take 30 minutes. There was no time to lose.

We made it to Nottingham exactly as the play was due to commence, and deposited the car in the nearest parking space to the theatre that I could find. The maximum time you were allowed to stay there was two hours, which clearly wasn’t enough, but I didn’t think it through that far so left it there anyway. As it turned out I got away with it. We then raced to the theatre, except Jess has got pneumonia and gets out of breath if she walks faster than two miles a year, so it was the slowest race ever. By the time we got there, it must have been ten minutes past curtain up, and I didn’t think they’d let us in. But they did, and we hadn’t missed much, and it was brill.

On the way home the GPS didn’t even send us on the M1. Which means that if I’d put in the right destination in the first place, it wouldn’t have sent us on that motorway on the way there, and we’d have avoided the congestion as well as a pointless detour. I really can be quite stupid, you know.

Hello! I’ve been struck by the cunning realisation that I can blog in bed on the laptop after Jess has gone to sleep, thus allowing me to do so during the course of the week far more than I would have otherwise. Shh, don’t wake her up.

And she needs plenty of sleep, for she is Unwell. Yesterday morning she awoke unable to breathe - not altogether, obviously, or she’d be dead, but doing so was difficult and painful. Now, Jess is allergic to anything with fur, and we have four cats, so whenever she comes to stay she shovels antihistamines down her throat to fend off the effects, and generally this does the trick; but it seemed probable that on this occasion they weren’t doing their job, so we thought it prudent to get out of the house until her symptoms had worn off.

We went to the pub for lunch. Her ability to breathe hadn’t really improved by the time we’d admitted defeat in our attempt to consume the remains of our jacket potatoes and spicy chicken wings, so next we went to the cinema to see The History Boys. Meanwhile, my mum changed all the bedding and vacuumed up any remaining cat hairs lying about, which turned out to be a waste of time because Jess still wasn’t feeling any better by the end of the film, by which point we’d been out of the house for five or six hours, so it was looking pretty clear that the cats were clear of any wrong-doing.

That being the case, there seemed no point in avoiding the house any longer, so we went home. I phoned NHS Direct, they said a nurse would phone us back, we waited a bit, and a nurse phoned us back. “Go to A&E,” she said.

So that’s what we did. By the time we got to the hospital, Jess hadn’t breathed comfortably for about nine hours, and was getting pretty sick of it; but somehow the magical curative powers of the hospital air took effect, and while we were there, she improved significantly. The next three hours were mostly spent waiting to be seen - the waiting occasionally being broken by someone seeing us, before telling us to wait for someone else - and by the end of it, several things had happened. Firstly, her condition had improved to the point that as long as she didn’t breathe in too deeply, she wasn’t in any pain; secondly, she’d been x-rayed, been given two types of oxygen, blown into two tubes three times each, had an ECG, given a blood sample, and described her symptoms to approximately six healthcare professionals; and thirdly, they’d worked out what was wrong with her.

Unfortunately we’re not quite sure what it was. What it sounded like was “pneumonia", which we thought seemed unlikely, and Jess had a theory that it was actually “an <something that sounds like ‘eumonia’>", but now that I read the wikipedia article on pneumonia and think back to what the doctor said, I think it probably is. Luckily she hasn’t got most of the symptoms, which all sound quite unpleasant, so they just sent her home with some pills.

She’s been feeling a lot better today. Right now, she’s fast asleep beside me, and her breathing sounds just fine. After seeing her in such discomfort yesterday, it’s the most wonderful sound in the world.

And that’s all I have to say today, except don’t forget to carve me a pumpkin!

It was great! el10t lied.

My mum has complained, with some justification, that I don’t blog enough these days, so I’m going to have a go at rectifying that. Except I still won’t do it much when I’ve got Jess with me - I’ve got far better things to be doing then - and next week’s half term, so don’t expect much more out of me before Hallowe’en.

I’d quite like to blog more often when I’m enJessified, for my own benefit - it would be nice to have a record of all my happy memories to look back on later* - but if it’s a choice between blogging about having fun or having more fun, I’ll generally opt for the latter. Though I will try to show my face a couple of times throughout the course of the week, if only to remind you to carve me a pumpkin.

Prolonged enJessification - and the fact that I haven’t planned ahead well enough to have already written it - means I won’t be doing another Hallowe’en story this year after all. I’m sure you’re all dreadfully disappointed. That tradition didn’t last long, did it?

Speaking of things that didn’t last long, I reported not long since that for the first time in years there was nothing wrong with me at all. I then had a brief resurgence of bum pox, but that went away quickly and shows no signs of coming back again - I’m putting it down as an aftershock - but now the side of the big toe on my left foot has swollen up in a painful and unattractive manner. I think it’s a symptom of an ingrowing toenail, because I had one on the big toe of my right foot years ago and it was just the same. I’ve had a stab at home-surgery - well, several stabs really - utilising a pair of scissors, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. I suppose I’d better put my foot in the hands of the professionals.

Meanwhile I seem to be getting extraordinarily fat. I think I’m going to have to resurrect the lardometer.

*Well, I suppose if they’re happy memories then by definition I have no need for a record of them - it’s more the happy memory lapses I’m worried about.

A couple of weeks ago I bought Jess a Christmas present on this Internet thingy. A day or two later it arrived - excited, I told this much to Jess, and she, even more excited, insisted that I show it to her on webcam. By way of compromise - or possibly just to taunt her - I let her see the box, with the name of the website cunningly hidden behind a piece of paper with jessissmelly.com written on it. The box - and this is what we in the trade call a plot point - was red.

This evening, she was surfing the informationsuperhighway in search of prezzies for me, and came across something perfect. There was only one problem - the website was red.

If the website was red, she reasoned, there was a considerable possibility that her purchase would be delivered in a red box. Which meant there was a smaller but still significant possibility that it was the same thing I’d got her.

She expressed this concern, and we tried to figure out how we could determine whether or not this was the case. I suggested that we both divulge the nature of the gift to an independent third-party, who could tell us if it was the same thing, and so we drafted in Katie, who has the honour of being the only person we’ve both got as a contact on MSN who was online at the time.

I was about to tell Katie what my present is, when Jess pointed out a snag - if it was the same thing, she’d be prevented from getting it for me, but she’d also know what I was getting her.

We debated this for a bit, and decided there was no way to preclude that risk, but we could at least work up to it gently. We both told Katie what the website was.

They were the same.

The next step was unavoidable, but we put it off for a bit anyway. Eventually we decided there was no point in delaying further, but not before agreeing between ourselves that if it turned out that we had both picked the same gift, I’d give it to her on Friday and get something else to fill the space in her stocking.

We both told Katie what the present was.

They were the same too.

So now we get to play Dread Pirate at the weekend! Yaaaaaaarrr!

I’ve just been and read Jess’s blog and it turns out she’s told this exact same story only she did it better than me. First we get one another the same present, then we write the same blog. Ho hum.

Dear former boss,

Hello! I wonder if you remember me? I’m the one who used to hide in the corner trying to look invisible whenever people started talking about the necessity of someone visiting a ship. On the day that I left your employ - which, I’m pleased to say, was well over a year ago now - you said: “Keep in touch!” and I said: “I will!".

Naturally, we both knew that this was a lie. I was sick of the sight of you, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual - the idea that I might keep in touch was absurd. But by pretending that this wasn’t the last time we’d ever speak to one another, we were able to discard all the messy formalities without openly acknowledging that I just wanted to get the hell out of the building as soon as humanly possible. This, then, is the letter I had no intention of writing, and still have no intention of actually sending to you. But who knows, maybe you read my blog.

Looking back at my time with you, it seems extraordinary that at no point did I run screaming into your office with a shovel and smash it over your head repeatedly. I wonder if you were expecting me to? I think if I’d been you, and had any conception of the seething resentment growing daily inside me, I’d have spent my days cowering in the corner with a bucket on my head. You were brave to walk around unarmed, I’ll give you that much.

Don’t get me wrong - as bosses go, you were probably better than most, and I was hardly a model employee. But, really, how can anyone endure eight hours a day of sitting at a desk in a place they don’t want to be, doing unutterably dull work in which they haven’t the slightest interest without going completely insane and believing themselves to be Vlad the Impaler? I can’t imagine a more hellish existence, and while you could hardly be held responsible for my position and the length of my tenure, I’m afraid that my brain has you filed as one strand of the living nightmare, and I would still find it difficult, given access to a pickaxe and your skull, not to apply the one to the other. The only thing that would save you from that fate, should such an opportunity arise, is the knowledge that had I not held that post, various chains of events would never have occurred and I would now most certainly not have the most wonderful girlfriend in the whole world, and in all probability would never have pursued the line of work I’m in now, which is really rather good fun. Seven years of sheer tedium was a small price to pay for all that, so with hindsight, things worked out rather marvellously, and I’m terribly grateful that you decided to give me a job. Sorry I was so rubbish at it.

A couple of people have asked me recently whether we’re going to have another pumpkin carving competition this year. Given the success of last year’s contest, the answer is yes of course we are! You’ve got until All Hallow’s Eve to buy or grow a pumpkin, carve it, take a photo, and email it to me with the handy ‘Email me’ link up there at the top of the page. The prize will be just as fantastic as it was last time, when it was nothing at all, so I expect every one of you to enter a pumpkin. So to speak. No excuses, thankyouverymuch.

I also intend to mark the occasion with another scary story - it is traditional, after all - though god knows when I’m going to find the time to write it. I suppose I’ll squeeze it in somewhere.

On the subject of pumpkins - or, more accurately, on a different subject altogether - you’ll recall me telling you that since I launched my revamped simongoodway.com, business has dropped off sharply, so I’ve now got five different versions of the site running simultaneously for experimental purposes. Would you like an update on that? No, of course you wouldn’t, there’s no reason why it would be remotely interesting to anyone but me. Well, you’re getting one anyway - the results aren’t of much statistical significance yet, but so far it’s looking like the changes to my site haven’t made much difference at all, and the apparent correlation between the relaunch and the slowness of business was mere coincidence. In a way, this is rather disappointing - I’d been gratified that the revamped site had made such a dramatic difference, even though it was in the wrong direction; it implied that once I’d worked out where I was going wrong, I might be able to correct my mistakes and engineer a similarly sharp jump the other way. Now it looks as though my customers couldn’t care less what the site looks like, so I’m going to have to come up with another cunning plan to increase their numbers.

You can go and look at some exciting dynamically generated graphs if you really want to.

I woke up this morning to an email from a nice lady at the BBC. It seemed that one of today’s topics of discussion on Radio 2’s popular afternoon programme The Jeremy Vine Show was ‘the problem of being asked “Do you have anything smaller"‘, and apparently the nice lady had googled for this phrase and come across an entry on my blog wherein I’d reflected upon it.

I was a bit puzzled by this, because I didn’t recall ever raising the subject - or even knowing quite what the problem of being asked “Do you have anything smaller” is, but a quick look at my access logs told me she’d come across this entry.

I contemplated ringing her and agreeing to discuss the issue on air with Mr Vine, but saw three objections.

1) I gibber at the best of times, and if I tried to talk intelligently on the radio about a subject on which I really have no opinion whatsoever, I would certainly make myself look like an idiot

2) I was scheduled to be driving up north at the time, and saw no incentive to delay my reunion with my lovely Jess

3) The only contribution I could make would be to recite the story told in the blog entry linked to above, which in itself is an utterly uninteresting tale, which I attempted to make into a vaguely worthwhile blog entry by telling it in a mildly entertaining manner, but while one can get away with such linguistic flourishes in written prose, one would sound like a pretentious weirdo if one actually spoke like that

I tried persuading Paul G0TLG in the chatroom to pretend to be me and do it in my place, but he wouldn’t go for it. And that, in case you listened to The Jeremy Vine Show this afternoon and thought to yourself “Why oh why aren’t we hearing SimonG’s input into this vital and fascinating issue?", is why.

I’ve got to be quick because our broadband isn’t working today and I’m in an internet cafe and I imagine they charge by the hour and I only want to pay for one and I’ve been here for 46 minutes already.

Really all I want to say is that this evening I spent several hours on the phone to various British Telecom call centres, mostly in queues, to establish why I couldn’t get online. I’m generally a very calm and happy person - as far as I can recall, having to deal with call centres is the only thing in the world that really really really really annoys me, to the point that I’d press the “Stab the person you’re talking to be with a big spike” button on the phone if there was one. I was getting particularly annoyed because they weren’t being terribly helpful - at one point someone in India even had the gall to claim that we don’t even have an account with British Telecom, at which point I got a little bit angry and possibly insinuated that his intelligence is roughly equivalent to that of a lobster.

It turns out we’ve switched to Talk Talk. I feel a bit guilty now.

Another weekend at the farm has come and gone. This weekend, two exciting occurrences almost occurred, but didn’t.

On Saturday we got back to the farm from Jess’s house, and I got out my keys to let us in. Except I didn’t let us in, because the key ring on which the key to the farm resided - which was a weird one with a little bit that unscrews, which I thought was quite neat when I first saw it because you could get keys on and off without having to prise open concentric coils of metal that don’t want to be prised open with your fingernail - had unscrewed itself, and the key was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh no!” I cried. “I’ve lost the key! Now we’ve got nowhere to stay and we’ll have to sleep on a park bench like tramps and the people who own the farm and are kind enough to let us stay here will be angry, and kind no more!”

So I had a search in the car, and on the ground, but it was nowhere to be seen. So we got back in the car, returned to Jess’s house, and searched there too. But the key continued to be unfound.

“Oh mother, might we spend the night here?” asked Jess, to her parent on her mother’s side. “For we are poor waifs with nowhere else to go.”

“You can,” replied said ancestor, “but your stepdad might chop Simon into little pieces.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said I. So I went and had another look for the key in the car.

It was under the driver’s seat. And thus the first exciting occurrence didn’t occur.

Then on Sunday we returned to the farm from somewhere else. Now, the bit of road next to the farm is steep and bumpy, and I suspect that trying to drive up it forwards does slightly less damage to my car than going up it in reverse, so on the way down - it’s at the bottom of the hill, you see - I tend to turn around and reverse into position, thus pointing me in the right direction to go forwards on the way back up. With me so far? Good. Now, on this particular occasion, the car of the woman who looks after the horses was parked in the middle of the road, which meant I had to slot myself in right at the edge. This called for careful judgement, which I don’t have much of at the best of times, and I have even less when I’m reversing down a steep and bumpy road and erring on the side of not crashing into the car of the woman who looks after the horses, with the consequence that I went a bit far over and got the back wheel of the car stuck on the top of the little wall that juts out at the side of the road.

This would have been so much easier to explain with a diagram.

So, the back wheel’s on top of a wall. I can’t go much further back, or it will fall off the end, there’ll be a big crash, and all my windows will fall off. So I try to go forwards instead (why have I suddenly switched to the present tense?). But now the car refuses to move in either direction, and begins to display the symptoms it displayed on previous occasions when I had to call out the AA, viz, a burning sort of smell, and smoke coming out of the dashboard.

“Oh dear,” I said (oh look, we’re back in the past tense).

Instead of calling the AA straight away - which would have been the second exciting occurrence that will subsequently fail to occur - I cunningly decided to leave it to cool down for a bit and then have another go at budging it myself. So we retired to the farmhouse and did some washing.

~*~*~*~*~* intermission *~*~*~*~*~

After a bit we went back out and had another bash at moving the car. It still didn’t want to move. On close inspection, some of the wheels had ground themselves into the mud, so we dug them out and tried again. It still wouldn’t move forwards, but it would go backwards now.

Unfortunately if it went back by more than a few millimetres, it would fall off the end of the wall.

I gave the matter some thought, and decided that if I turned the steering wheel all the way to the left, reversing would cause the back wheel of the car to elegantly dismount from the side of the wall, onto the ground beside it, and roll gently down the road. I tried it. The wheel went off the end of the wall and stopped halfway to the ground, as gravity’s pull was thwarted by the wall making contact with my undercarriage.

Now the back end of the car was hanging off the end of a wall, the wheel in mid-air. Attempts to move it in either direction would obviously be futile. It was time to call out the AA - or was it? No, it wasn’t.

With unusual intelligence, I realised that all I had to do was re-landscape the ground beneath it. Shoving a load of rocks and bricks under the wheel to fashion a temporary road surface, then removing half the stones from the wall - which I managed, to my surprise, without the car crashing down on my hand and cutting short my career as an illustrator - I was then able, even more to my surprise, to reverse the car down my makeshift slope and thence drive it merrily back up the road. And thus I didn’t have to call out the AA, and the second exciting occurrence that almost occurred, didn’t.

Though it could be considered a little bit exciting, in that it’s the first time I’ve had vehicular trouble since getting my new car, which either proves or disproves either my mum’s theory that my previous car was cursed, or my theory that I just don’t get on with diesels, depending on your point or points of view.

Which reminds me - the blog entry concerning my curious decision to fill my diesel car with petrol has now had… oh, I can’t be bothered to count them, but an awful lot of comments from people who’ve just done the same thing. I never knew there were so many stupid people in the world.

Anyway, now the weekend’s over and I’m back home and back at work. My parents have gone on holiday this week, so I’ve got the house all to myself. If anyone wants a wild and crazy party, let me know.

At lunchtime I yielded to the desire for a KFC. While I was out, I first popped into PC World to replenish my stack of DVD-Rs. The woman at the checkout was instructed by the computer to phone Barclaycard - this was, she assured me, a random security check. She spoke to Mr Barclaycard for a moment and then handed the phone to me.

“Hello!” I said.

“Hello!” said Mr Barclaycard. “I’ll just begin by asking a few security questions. Who do you share your card with?”

“Er… no one.”

“Correct! It was a trick question! What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

“Melon. I wanted Crunchy Nut Cornflakes but we’d run out.”

“Right again! And finally, do you feel an ever growing sensation of your life being sucked away and an increasing awareness of your own mortality, the futility of existence, and the possibility that you may have left it too late to make any real mark on the world so that you might have been remembered after you’re dead?”

“Er, sorry?”

“I said how old will you be on your next birthday?”

“Thirty.”

“That’s right! Now that we’ve proved who you are, let’s get down to the real issue - have you recently attempted to make a payment of a thousand and something pounds at a jeweller’s in Athens?”

“Um, no.”

“I knew it! I said to Fred the moment it came up on the computer, I said that’s never a legitimate transaction! What’s he going to be doing spending that much money at a jeweller’s, I said. He’s far too tramp-like to bother with that sort of thing himself, and too stingy to be coughing up a grand on a present for his girlfriend. It’s got to be a crook! Quick Fred, I said, press the big red button that sends an electric surge through the chip ‘n’ pin machine and kills the dastardly criminal who’s somehow attempting to abuse Mr Goodway’s account!”

So now they’ve blocked my card and posted me a new one. Which is a minor and fleeting inconvenience but I suppose I’ll live.

Then I went to KFC and was served by the most incompetent woman in the world. In the course of fulfilling my simple order (a three piece Colonel’s meal with Pepsi and a side order of sweetcorn), she made, by my calculation, five mistakes.

Mistake number one: She asked me if I wanted to ‘go large’. I said I didn’t, so I only got a small Pepsi. I haven’t seen any official documentation on the size of the drink you’re supposed to get with a Colonel’s meal, but I’m sure I’ve always been given a large one in the past without having to pay extra.
Mistake number two: She didn’t ask me whether I want to eat in or take away, and started putting my food on a tray. I wanted to take away, and made her put it in a bag.
Mistake number three: I’d noticed when she was putting it on the tray that there seemed to be only two chicken pieces, so I checked before leaving the counter and confirmed this. I pointed out the error to her.
Mistake number four: “That’s right,” she said. “You ordered a two piece Colonel’s meal with 7 Up". I have no idea where she got 7 Up from. The drink which she’d just given me, and which was sitting on the counter right in front of her as she said this, was quite clearly Pepsi.
Mistake number five: She then tried to charge me an extra pound for the third piece of chicken I was demanding. I had to point out that she’d originally charged me the correct amount for the three pieces I’d ordered, and I’d already paid for it.

I reckon I’d have got better service if they’d fried her and let one of the chickens serve me.

Well that’s a nice surprise.

I’ve decided that it’s about time I started saving money, so this morning I worked out a plan to do that very thing. I was just about to tell you all about it, when during my pre-blogging cogitations I realised an error in my calculations that works in my favour. Which is good.

At the beginning of every calendar month, I shall set myself a spending limit. This will be my average earnings over the previous five months, minus the amount that leaks out of my account via a couple of direct debits, minus another five hundred quids for saving purposes. By taking the average, rather than just going with the previous month’s earnings as my starting point, my budget will still follow fluctuations in my income but the impact of very good or bad periods won’t be quite so dramatic.

My initial calculations had told me that I can only spend £600 this month, which could have been tricky, but I just realised that I’d subtracted my outgoing mortgage payment but not taken my incoming rent payment into account, so I can actually spend nearly twice as much as I thought. Which means, I suppose, that I have absolutely no excuse to fail. We’ll see.

But let’s talk about deafness. I’m deaf in one ear, as those of you who’ve stood on my right hand side and had your brilliant conversation completely ignored by me will have discovered. In all but the least noisy environments, this does mean that I have difficulty making out what people are saying to me, and I’m aware that as the hearing in my other ear worsens with age - as it inevitably will - I’m going to spend large portions of my time not really having a clue what’s going on. Come to think of it, I rarely know what’s going on now, so just think how confused I’ll be when I can’t make out a word.

Wishing to delay the inevitable, I’m mildly paranoid about subjecting my good ear to anything that might do it damage. So when a couple of weeks ago, at the eighteenth birthday party of Jess’s friend Eleanor, the band which had been hired for the occasion started playing very loudly indeed - imagine a small nuclear explosion inside your ear drum and you’ll get the general idea - I sat through a couple of songs, but eventually the thought of my poor cilia committing mass suicide proved too much for me, and I had to go outside.

Jess, being the wonderful girlfriend that she is, refused to let me sit in the car park on my own and accompanied me, which was very nice of her and we had a lovely time, but I did feel a bit guilty to have dragged her away from it. In the second act - or ’set’, as we musically minded people say - half the party came outside with us, so I didn’t need to feel guilty that time and it was all jolly pleasant.

The reason I bring this up is that this weekend, another of her friends is performing with his band in a concert that she may wish to attend, and she tells me it may well be as loud as the other one, so I’m left with a bit of a dilemma. Do I accompany her and face the music come what may - which, if it gets too loud, would be like a person with a morbid fear of jelly sitting in a bath full of jelly and eating a jelly while dressed up as a jelly; go along but head for the door if it gets too much for me - which would spoil the concert for Jess, for no matter how much I urge her to remain in the audience, she would surely insist on coming outside with me, because she’s lovely like that; fashion an ear plug out of a cheesy wotsit; or just drop her off at the start and amuse myself back at the farm for the duration?

I don’t even know whether she’s going to want to go yet, so it’s a little premature to be worrying about this too much, but it’s a dilemma, innit.

So Jess and I went bowling with her two little brothers and one little cousin, right, and I was convinced that everyone was going to beat me and make me look rubbish and stupid, BUT I won! And Jess lost, so now she looks rubbish and stupid, which is great! True, we had those things down the sides so you can’t roll your ball into the gutter (though one of her brothers somehow managed it anyway), so you could chuck it down the alley at a stupid angle and still stand a decent chance of knocking down half the pins, and some people might say that renders the scores largely a matter of chance, but to those people I say: I won! Yay me! I’m great!

And then, ooh, loads of other things happened that involved me being great. I can’t remember what any of them were now.

Oh, and my bum pox has come back. It’s not too bad yet, but I’m keeping a close eye on it, inasmuch as you can keep a close eye on your bum. Which no doubt some people can, but I’m not that flexible.