I’ve just dropped off my car to be MOTed, and it isn’t worth going home - by the time I’d completed the various legs of my journey by foot, bus, rickshaw and mule it would be time to come out again - so I’ve got an hour and a half to kill in Rawtenstall library and absolutely no excuse not to knock out a decently sized entry on this dusty web page that was once a magnificent, shiny blog.

When I lived in Essex, one of the greatest pleasures in life was getting a new MOT (I had a fairly dull life). The garage where I got it done was on my route to work, and immediately before my workplace, so I could drop my car off on the way in, walk the last fifteen seconds of the journey, and pick it up at the end of the day with anything that had failed fixed and a crisp new MOT certificate to pin up on my wall and be proud of. And the chap who ran the garage was a jolly nice chap and I trusted him not to rip me off. The sheer convenience of it - the fact that it fit so snugly into my daily routine - just made it feel so satisfying and… well… kentucky.

I rather miss the convenience of that little garage. I suppose I could have taken my car there today, but since it would have been an eight and a half hour round trip I feel some of the convenience would be lost.

We’d had a plan to go to Alton Towers yesterday. But I discovered on Wednesday that my MOT certificate ran out on Thursday, and the earliest I could book in to get a new one was Saturday, so it wouldn’t have been legal for me to drive on Friday. As a result we cancelled the trip, and it wasn’t until Friday lunchtime that I realised I’d got mixed up with the dates and it expired a day later than I’d thought. Which is a shame really, because next week’s half term so Alton Towers will be ridiculously busy, and after that Jess will be far too busy revising to spend a day hurtling around corners at disorientating speeds feeling like she’s going to be sick. And that’s just getting there.

See, if I’d opened with that paragraph, I could then have segued nicely into the fact that I’ve just dropped off my car to be MOTed, and this would all have flowed as though I’d planned it in advance. Oh well, I’m not editing it. We’ll go for a stream of consciousness effect instead.

I wonder what else I need to talk about. In the comments on my last post Kouros instructed me to explain my poor performance on the lardometer, so I suppose I’d better do that. In my defence I should say that my scales have broken (or possibly they need a new battery), so it probably doesn’t reflect my current weight. But that isn’t much of a defense really because I suspect my current weight is actually several pounds greater. The main problem, I think, is that I’ve done absolutely no exercise since I moved house, and my diet lately has been abysmal. It’s hardly my fault that cakes and cookies and pizza and chicken wings and chips and chocolate are so yummy, is it?

We went to Frankie & Benny’s on Thursday - there are the chicken wings again, you see. We got there ten minutes after it opened, and were the only customers, but there was some sort of staff training session going on, with most of the employees sitting round one of the tables and some chap giving them a big talk about all sorts of issues conducive to running a successful Italian American restaurant. It was the sort of talk which is utterly dull when you’re supposed to be listening to it - he did try to make it look like entertainment at one point by showing them a clip of The Simpsons, but I don’t think they fell for it - but which you can’t help being riveted to when you’re not supposed to be listening and it’s absolutely none of your business and you’re nosy. Unfortunately they were all the way over on the other side of the restaurant, and it was echoey, and I’m deaf, so I only heard the occasional word, but if I ever find myself in a situation where someone needs to manage a Frankie & Benny’s in an emergency and there’s no one else available, I’d be willing to give it a shot. I know you have to do something about doors and something about fire, and something that somehow relates tenuously to The Simpsons. I think I could pull it off.

You know what? Blogging’s fun! I should do this more often.

But right now I’ve run out of things to say, so we’ll leave it there. Bye!

Jess bought me a present and it’s the best thing ever! Look -

It’s a pirate monkey! He’s called Captain Bananabeard - I know because it says so on the certificate. It didn’t say his parrot’s name on the certificate so I’ve named her Polly-Esther.

The tag that came around his wrist says:

To our special girl Zoe on the arrival of your baby sister Ella. Love love love, Mummy and Daddy

So either buildabear.com have erred and Zoe is about to receive a teddy with my name on the tag, or Jess stole my present from the hands of a small child. Either way, he’s brilliant!

Thanks to el10t’s Adventure Game Thingy, you can now go on a virtual tour of our house! Unless you’re a burglar, in which case I’d really rather you didn’t.

So much has been going on I don’t know where to start. But if I don’t start now, I’ll have to start later when even more has been going on, and the end result will be that I’ll never blog again.

The Rubik’s cube in my throat stayed in residence for quite some time, though after a couple of days it was bigger and apparently made of silica gel. So not only was swallowing rather painful, but my throat was also unpleasantly dry, and the only thing that made it feel better was honey. So for a week I was forced to carry a jar of honey with me wherever I went, sucking big blobs of it off my finger at frequent intervals. And it wasn’t even entirely just an excuse to eat lots of honey.

Then I turned thirty. For my special birthday treat we went to Monkey Forest, but it was a wet and miserable day, which didn’t bother me but it bothered the monkeys, who were also wet and miserable, and as such rather less active than they’ve been on previous visits. So instead of entertaining us with lots of monkey antics, they were sitting around munching bits of dinner and generally looking sorry for themselves.

And then there were the other four thousand things I was going to tell you that I’ve completely forgotten about, so they’ll have to wait until next time. And it’s anyone’s guess when that’s going to be.

So let’s see, what’s been happening?

Today I’m in constant awful soul-searing agony - or minor discomfort, if you prefer, and it isn’t really constant because it only hurts when I swallow. Either I’ve got some sort of throatial virus or I’ve swallowed a Rubik’s cube. Either way it isn’t very pleasant, and I hope it’s gone away by tomorrow for that is my birthday, and a momentous and significant one at that, for I shall be thirty and an Old Man. Then all my teeth will fall out and I’ll die and that will be the end of me.

And I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if my teeth do fall out, because until a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t set foot inside a dental surgery since I was eighteen, and when I set foot inside an etc a couple of weeks ago it was only to accompany Jess - I hid in the background, afraid that the dentist would glance over at the state of my mouth and react like a vet who’s just spotted someone kicking a puppy. I got away with it, but the episode has left me with a heightened awareness of the fact that one of my teeth - three to the left of the middle on the bottom row - is in completely the wrong place, protruding as it does in a roughly horizontal orientation like some kind of tusk. It’s never bothered me in the past, but now I keep getting annoyed by it, and catching myself poking it with a finger. Because obviously what we can learn from the fact that people have to wear braces for years on end is that a displaced tooth can be remedied by poking.

So now I’m living in fear that someone’s going to pounce on me from behind a bush and shoot me to make a piano.