When I was - ooh, maybe about twelve or thirteen, I always had trouble sleeping. Well, not always - I was fine at the weekends, it was just when I knew I’d got to get up in the morning, and thus had to get to sleep, that the awareness of this necessity kept me awake. Presumably related to this issue was another problem - sometimes I would wake up in the morning, get out of bed, get dressed, go downstairs, get my breakfast, then look at the clock and realise it was about half past three and I’d only dreamt that my alarm had gone off.

The latter psychological ailment soon passed, but the former stayed with me, and I always hoped that one day I’d have a job where I worked from home and could get up whenever I liked, and thus dispense with my alarm clock altogether. About fifteen years later that finally happened, and at last I was falling asleep without the least difficulty every single night.

And then I moved in with my lovely girlfriend and lived happily ever after. But also quite tiredly ever after, because now I have to get up when the alarm goes off to give her a lift, which I’m more than happy to do, but it means that once again I find myself lying awake into the early hours of the morning trying to fall asleep and, because I’m trying to fall asleep, failing. So we went to Asda and bought me some Nitol.

I took one for the first time last night. Several aeons still passed before I drifted into the land of dreams, but it doesn’t seem to have failed entirely to have an effect on me. The first memory I have of this morning is Jess saying “Is it really only 8 o’clock? The alarm went off ages ago.” At which point I investigated the clock, which did indeed show the time as 8:00, but this was evidently because whoever turned the alarm off had slid the switch too far and it was now in the ‘Alrm Set’ position, and displaying not the current time but the time at which it was scheduled to go BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. And apparently the person who did that was me, but for the life of me I can’t remember doing it.

The time was actually twenty past nine. Having discovered this, we both fell immediately back to sleep and didn’t wake up again until midday.

I’m blaming the Nitol. I don’t know what Jess’s excuse is.

A whole week without blogging! That’s never happened before through sheer laziness.

Part of the reason is that most of the little time my busy life allows me to spend messing about on the computer is currently spent working on a super new game I’m making just for YOU. It’s going to be jolly good. And it’s coming soon, where ’soon’ means ‘any time in the next year’.

Meanwhile, Jess had revision to do today and I bribed her with the promise of a trip to Frankie and Benny’s, so there won’t be a dressing up game again tonight. Nor will there be any further reduction in my waistline. That grey man’s catching up fast.

Anyway, er… the thing is, I could sit here trying to think of something to tell you about, or I could go and do some more work on my game. So I’ll go and do that then, shall I? Good, we’re agreed then. Bye for now.

Every day I mean to blog but it never happens. I have time management issues.

It’s all a question of squeezing it into my routine, and what a happy routine it is. Each morning I roll out of bed, give Jess a lift to the workhouse, sit down at the computer and reply to my emails whilst eating a croissant, do some drawing, pick Jess up, and have a lovely evening together which, if Jess gets her way, usually consists of watching seventeen episodes of Lost.

Life is good in our little cottage. So good, in fact, that it seems hardly possible when you consider that it’s a mere two years since my lowest point when I was living in a hotel in Essex doing the most boring job in the world.

…And that’s as far as I got writing my blog this morning. I then realised I didn’t have anything else to say, thought about it for a bit, noticed how late it was getting, and decided I’d better do some work instead. But then a policeman came round and insulted me, so I can tell you about that.

He’d just popped round to give me an update on the progress of his investigation into The Case Of The Burgled Laptop. One of the leads which his inquiries has brought up is a couple of dodgy characters lurking about outside, observed by the neighbours at around sixteen hundred hours on the 28th inst. Apparently there was a stocky bloke in his mid-twenties, accompanied by a shorter sidekick.

“But,” said the policeman, “you were home by that time. So that could have been you, couldn’t it.”

That could have been us? Granted, given the timing it can only have been Jess and I who the neighbour spotted, but the policeman could have had the decency to acknowledge the foolishness of this description. Me, a stocky bloke in his mid-twenties? Well, I turn thirty in a couple of weeks, so I’m not going to complain about the mid-twenties part, but stocky? Pah! I don’t know about yours, but my dictionary has this to say:

stock·y (stok‘e)

adj., -i·er, -i·est.

1. Solidly built; sturdy.
2. Chubby; plump.

Chubby? Plump? Haven’t they seen the lardometer lately? I think we should all be grateful that this so-called eyewitness wasn’t the sole observer of a more serious crime, because the chance of the offender getting their just desserts would clearly be nil. “A devilishly handsome young man with a flat stomach, shapely figure and winning smile” maybe, but “a stocky bloke in his mid-twenties"? Honestly, it makes you wonder how some people manage to put their socks on.

And then this evening we went out to a lovely restaurant for some dinner. Each of us was given a packet of breadsticks with an oil painting printed on the outside. Jess got this one, which you will recognise as a self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh:

Whereas I got Dance at Bougival by Renoir:

Look at that - it’s exactly the same bloke! He’s even wearing the same hat! What’s Van Gogh doing popping up in a painting by Renoir? You’d think thirty-five self-portraits would be enough, but no, he had to sneak into everybody else’s pictures as well. Still, I suppose I should just be grateful that I recognised him - if it were up to my neighbour we’d have been looking for a clean-shaven black bloke with a full complement of ears.

Well most of my jobs-on-the-go maintained their waiting-for-feedback status for the duration of Jess’s fortnight of holiday, so I’ve had a lovely long Easter break too. But now it’s Monday morning and the world of people-who-want-drawings-doing seems to have woken up, so here I am back in my little office at the top of the stairs in my lovely house which I share with my lovely girlfriend, both of which I love, though the latter more than the former. The other way round would be weird.

“Enough of that! Tell us the recent history of your association with mobile phone chargers!” I hear you cry. Alrighty then. Many months ago I lost the mains charger for my phone. So I went into Mains Chargers For Your Phone R Us to get another one, but they only had cigarette lighter ones. The five million hours a week that I then spent driving between Lancashire and Leicesesecestershire provided ample charging time, so this was a perfectly happy solution. And so life rolled on, and the whole episode continued to be utterly uninteresting.

Then I moved into my lovely house which I share with my etc, and I ceased to spend five million hours a week driving. Being the disorganised person that I am, I failed to do anything about the phone charger situation for the first couple of weeks, with the result that it kept going flat and I had to go and sit in the car with the engine on if I wanted to make a call. This still wouldn’t have been much of a problem if we had any other phones I could use, but Jess’s mobile had been burgled, and we hadn’t bothered to get a landline on the grounds that we’ve both got mobiles.

So I hopped onto the nearest Internet and ordered another charger. Since my phone is a little out of date, none of the big websites I know and trust seem to sell them any more - none of the few I could be bothered to check, at least, so I had to choose from obscure sites I’ve never heard of. After careful research I decided to get it from the nice people at mobilefun.co.uk. A day or two later it arrived, except the thing that arrived wasn’t a mobile phone charger at all. On careful inspection of the confirmation email they sent me, it does appear that I somehow managed to order completely the wrong thing, so in this instance we must presume that the fault was mine. Either that or their website doesn’t work, but if there’s ever the possibility that an error was the result of me doing something stupid, it’s generally safe to assume that it probably was.

So I went back online and ordered one from theuksource.com. This time I was extra careful and took the precaution of looking at the monitor and using my brain, instead of just mashing my hand into the keyboard and hoping for the best. When the confirmation email arrived, I scrutinised it carefully to make sure I’d ordered “1 x Motorlola V220 Mains Charger = £2.99″, which it assured me I had.

They sent me a new battery instead.

For my third attempt I’ve tried portable-power.co.uk. I wonder what I’ll get this time. I reckon either an inflatable banana or the Paul Daniels Magic Annual 1982.

Good grief, it’s the twelfth and I’ve only blogged thrice this month. This is a new low.

We’ve had another busy week, you see. On Monday we went to the garden centre for various plant related items, and to purchase hotdogs from the hotdog van outside, which Jess insisted were the best hotdogs in the world ever (and having tasted them, I can’t disagree). If you check your notes, you will see that Monday was a fairly cold and rainy day in the Lancashire area, which is just the sort of day on which a hotdog is exactly what you want to consume, and an ice cream is exactly what you don’t, and as such there was a very long queueueue for the hotdog van and no queueueueue at all for Mr Softie’s van across the street. Mr Softie himself looked utterly dejected and miserable, and as we waited in line for our hotdogs I watched his growing despair and began to fear that he might do something silly. Hotdog after hotdog was sold, but ice cream sales there were none.

Clearly Mr Softie needed our help. Pausing only to bet Jess a bite of hotdog that he wouldn’t get a single customer before we were served, I vowed to have one of his biggest, most expensive ice creams for pudding. You see, I might not assist old ladies who are being dragged down the street on their stomach by a hyperactive dog, but when real sacrifice is called for I don’t even hesitate.

But then what happened was that someone went and bought an ice cream! I was a bit miffed that I’d lost my bet, and felt momentarily inclined to take my irritation out on Mr Softie by not giving him my custom; but that changed when I saw how happy he was to have made a sale. You should have seen his little face, beaming like he’d just been cleared of cancer and found a big chocolate cake in the fridge that he’d forgotten about. Never before have I witnessed such a dramatic and heart warming transformation from abject misery to utter joy and elation. Oh, happy happy Mr Softie! I wanted to make him that happy too, and I couldn’t wait to go and buy my ice cream and see his happy face.

But then a load of other people turned up and he got a great big queueueueue all of his own, so he lost my sympathy and I didn’t bother. And I put ketchup on my hotdog which meant that Jess, being odd, didn’t want any of it, so I got to eat it all anyway.

And then on Tuesday and Wednesday we did some other things.

It’s Easter Sunday - I thought I’d better point that out in case the mound of half-eaten chocolate eggs around you hadn’t given it away - which means we’re halfway through Jess’s fortnight of holiday. Being a self-employed person I can of course take my holiday whenever the mood strikes, but I had intended to mostly work, leaving Jess free of distractions to keep her away from revision, coursework, or - more likely - playing on her Wii. Fate, however, has dictated otherwise, for although I’ve got a reasonable number of jobs on the go at present, they’ve all hit the waiting-for-feedback-from-client stage at once - as happens occasionally, in accordance with the laws of probability - so I too have had a bit of an unscheduled week off. Unfortunately Jess was ill for the first half of the week, during which time she had the audacity to BREATHE, with the result that I was ill for the rest of it, so we’ve mostly spent the time variously lying in bed groaning and insisting that we’re about to die, and listening to one another groaning and insisting that they’re about to die. So far neither of us has fulfilled the promise.

Yesterday we did summon the energy to make a trip into Rochdale, where we popped into Subway for some lunch. There we sat eating our sandwiches, and from our vantage by the window we witnessed outside possibly the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.

It began with a hunchbacked old woman walking her dogs… or what appeared to be an old woman, though what happened subsequently leads me to suspect otherwise. But I’m pretty sure the dogs were real. There were two dogs, and they were only little, but they were very excited and seemed to be under the twin misapprehensions that a) the hunchbacked old woman was a maypole, and b) it was May, and so they were running around her merrily and - being less stable on her feet than we presume she may have been in her youth - the hunchbacked old woman was having great difficulty remaining vertical. Jess suggested that I go out and assist her, and I would have liked to, but unfortunately just sitting and watching it was too entertaining, so really my hands were tied.

Which, coincidentally, was also the condition of the hunchbacked old woman’s hands by this point, and she spent the next five minutes disentangling herself from the leads. She finally succeeded, and then started disentangling the leads from one another - all the time hindered by the opposing efforts of her dogs - at which point another old woman came along and started to chat to her. They chatted for another five minutes or so, at which point the original old woman walked off, leaving the new old woman with her dogs!

Now, the two old women looked sufficiently alike, and their antics with the dog leads had been so protracted, that only a person who had been studying the scene as intently as I would be aware that the women had switched over. It was at this point that I began to theorise that they were not old women at all, but able-bodied young spies in clever disguises.

I was arguing this point with Jess for several minutes, when the first old woman returned and took the leads back from her fellow spy. They then continued to chat for a while longer, and were still chatting when we left - I wanted to stay and find out what happened next, but Jess wouldn’t let me - so we can only guess just what they were up to. But given the low speed that the hunchbacked old woman was able to attain as she hobbled away, it seems clear that the period for which she was out of the picture was nowhere near long enough for her to actually do anything useful. Unless, of course, she wasn’t really a hunchbacked old woman at all.

So there’s definitely something fishy going on there. I’ve a good mind to alert the authorities.

Well I don’t know about you but I’ve had a busy week.

Our front door has now been repaired - not that that’s got anything to do with my busy week, since I played no part in it, but it’s a vital update you should be made aware of in case any of you were planning to take advantage of its structural weakness to burgle us again - and is now fitted with four hundred locks, eighty-seven bolts, CCTV, half a dozen flame throwers, and a big spike that drops from the ceiling if it’s struck with too much force. If anyone breaks in now, the most we’ll have to deal with is an unpleasant stain on the carpet.

Meanwhile I was lying in bed this morning - overlooking the technicalities that a) we haven’t got a bed yet and b) it was well after noon - when I heard my phone ringing downstairs. Pulling on the nearest dressing gown, which happened to belong to Jess, I scurried down to catch the call. It turned out to be two policemen standing outside the door, who had failed to rouse me by knocking and correctly surmised that the gentle ring of a telephone might do the trick. It transpired that they were here to take a statement, their colleague having neglected to take one previously, so I had to sit on the sofa surrounded by a pair of burly officers wearing nothing but a frilly pink dressing gown with a picture of My Little Pony embroidered on the back. I’ve heard of plain clothes policemen, but that was just silly.

There is apparently no update on their endeavour to track down the young person who popped round to borrow Jess’s laptop, but we had to send off our fingerprints the other day for elimination purposes. Cutting them out of my fingers was quite painful, but if it helps in the fight against crime then no doubt it’s a worthwhile sacrifice.

What else has been happening? Ooh, all sorts of things probably, but while I’m here I want to remind you that there’s a dressing up game tonight, back at the usual time of 8 o’clock, and if I wait much longer before posting this then the odds of anyone actually reading it by then will be pretty slim, so we’d better leave it there for now. Bye!

On Wednesday our washing machine arrived. We’d paid for delivery and installation, but the chap who delivered it took one look at the hole the waste pipe had to go through, and proclaimed it inaccessible. He signed a note acknowledging that he’d failed to install it which we could wave at the nice people in Argos to get a refund, and left.

I asked our landlady about this and she assured me that both she and the people who were renting the place before us had fitted a washing machine with no difficultly at all, so we concluded that the delivery chap was incompetent.

Yesterday my parents came up with our self-assembly bed in the car. While Jess and I self-assembled it, my dad installed the washing machine with so little difficulty that I suspect the delivery chap was not so much incompetent as lazy. Unfortunately I now can’t find the note he signed, so I doubt I’ll be able to get my money back for the installation he didn’t do.

Meanwhile, bed assembly was going reasonably well. A couple of the legs were missing, but a few books would do the job as a temporary measure, so we weren’t too worried about that. We’d attached the headboard and footboard to the bits of wood that run down the sides and the one that goes down the middle. Now all we needed to do was lie in place the slats that run the length of the bed.

Unfortunately the slats were this wide (imagine here that I’m holding my arms apart) whereas the gap between the bits of wood which their ends were supposed to rest on was this big (I’m holding them a bit wider apart now). On further inspection, the headboard and footboard were for a kingsize bed, whereas everything else wasn’t. So we had to take it all apart again, and we’re back to sleeping on the floor until the right parts turn up.