Harry's Revenge

I should have known better, I really should. Earlier this week (29th March) I wrote a post about my anonymous nephew Harry and his ex-mobile phone. I should  not have done so. It was tempting fate from the start and was a cheap blog post at his expense. Somehow Harry (Or some cyber-mercenary employed by Harry) got hold of the "Spite Goblin" (8th January post).

The Spite Goblin was obviously employed to exact revenge on Harry's behalf and by God did he! The day after the post about Harry appeared i.e yesterday I had a full day of meetings in London most of them an hour long. This meant being up at about 5.45 - no serious issue there and getting to the airport for about 7.00 a.m. So far so good. The Spite Goblin waits until I get to City airport in London before unleashing the "Tummy Bug"! One of those which keeps you guessing about how far you can walk and how long you can wait.

Yesterday was a long day - the bug got worse as the day wore on. I hardly heard a word that was being said in any of the meetings I went to and on several occasions I tried to close the meetings early so I could walk to the nearest loo. Notice I did not say "run" to the nearest loo,- I could not have run if my life depended on it. Had it not been for my physio Mark giving me the bum exercises (7th February) I might have been in the Sh$t!!

So all day I went looking for toilets

....with no thought of it being a safe place (4th March)

With the end of the day approaching I had to get back to Edinburgh which involved a walk to Monument tube station. 9 minutes wait for the train, 30 mins on the Docklands Light Railway, an hour at the airport (including 20 mins queuing for security), an hour on the plane and 45 min drive home. Plenty of opportunity for serious public embarrassment. The tricky bit was going to be getting to City Airport......Then a moment of genius....The Imodium Sprite!!

Home safe and feeling better and promising I will never mess with Harry ever, ever again!!

RIP

Sometimes you sit in front of your blog and struggle to think what to write about. Other times the "Gods of the Interwebtube" intervene and gift you a blog from out of nowhere. The Gods have done just that for me today.

My nephew, who will probably want to remain anonymous, called Harry had a mobile phone. He works on a farm and has recently been digging a trench. From what I can gather he filled the trench in again since when he has not been able to find his mobile telephone. We probably all reach the same conclusion at the same time - the phone has got to be in the trench. From my point of view it cannot be anywhere else since it would destroy this posting! So Harry-the-anonymous-nephew has three options

1. Dig up the trench
2. Post a comment to let me know he has found his phone and
3. Put a gravestone on the trench to mark the passing of his phone

My vote goes to

Dutch Tourists

It started with the Iranian Secret Police but it has now gone further. It turns out people in Holland are now reading this drivel. Holland is a great country - having been there I can testify personally to that fact. However Holland suffers with a road traffic problem which is pretty unique and almost unheard of - Hill Starts. I am not making this up - given that the country is pretty flat it is nigh on impossible for the average Dutch learner driver to find a slope big enough to practice a hill start. When I visited Den Helder - right in the north of the country I witnessed a day long parade of learner drivers from up to an hour's drive away waiting to drive up the approach ramp to the sea wall. It was obviously a pretty big sea wall - about three metres high and the ramp was not that long but just enough to meet the need.







The problem doesn't end there - once they have passed their tests the average Dutch driver never does a hill start in normal day to day driving. Eventually they settle down get married have kids and decide to go on holiday. They are big fans of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, British Rock and the Monarchy so head to Britain. The drive from Holland to Calais/Ostende is pretty flat and then they arrive at Dover or Folkestone. Getting out of either town involves going up a hill - these poor Dutch guys start at the bottom in fourth gear and halfway up their engines sound knackered. Luckily the council has put a lay by there for just this emergency. The hapless Dutch drivers are thinking - "great my first holiday abroad and the car has broken down two miles from the ferry!". In the lay by, I am reliably informed, there is an RAC phone on which it tells them in Dutch to try changing down gears when going up hills.

No sense of humour!!! And real live footage of your blogger

A few weeks ago I explained the trouble I got into using a photo of George Clooney on the company intranet  directory and revealed my latest masterpiece which replaced the image of George. You may remember the issue was copyright.




As of today I have had my wrist royally slapped for not taking our (My French employer's) communications seriously. Is it my fault that others expect realism in their representations and cannot see that my art communicates so much ore? Nonetheless I am forced to comply - and I thought it was the Germans who had too many rules and French who had none - shows how wrong you can be!

So to keep the French masters happy here is a link to the real me in action
http://www.axawealth.co.uk/investments/videos

Hello Iran

As a relatively "new-to-the-world-of-blogging" person I am still learning a lot about what goes on. I found out today that one of the people who has viewed this blog lives in Iran! Why? Who? Language barriers and all that?? What would they have made of my picture of chicken stuffed with rocket? (see Jan 30th Misunderstandings) The questions are spinning around in my head.

So if you are the person in Iran who clicked on this - please leave a comment and tell me who are you are.

Of course it might have been the Iranian Secret police using a search programme to throw up every reference on the internet to words like "rocket" in case they find someone who can help with their nuclear programme. In which case - please do not get in touch at all! Not only will I be very nervous but you will be severly disappointed when you discover that far from being a nuclear rocket scientis I failed Physics A Level.

If you never see another blog posting it could mean that the Iranian Secret Police have no sense of humour and I have been taken out!!

If you want the easy way to follow thi blog - pop your email in the bar above and hit submit!

God's a Porpoise

Been a weird week - kicked off with seeing a doctor, a German doctor, who looked at my sore throat and declared
"Ah, I zee pus!"
Any British doctor would no doubt have said
"You have tonsillitis".
Nonetheless I took myself off to Basingstoke for three days where I attended a course run by a trainer called Ecky- a German trainer. (You can see a theme developing). The trainer repeatedly told us he was married to an Argentinian woman and he lived in Switzerland whilst training a group of English people who work for a French company (I was probably the only one picking up on the Nazi war criminal link during the course).

My sore throat was joined by a cold and I stopped paying total attention to what Ecky was saying. At some stage he wrote on the flip chart "God's a porpoise". I sat there lost - I have studied theology in my past and at no point had anyone even hinted at the notion of God being a porpoise.

I wondered briefly if this was some new fangled German/Argentinian/Swiss cult thing before I realised that I had misread the flip chart. It actually said "Goals & Purpose".

First joke in the blog

An Englishman, Scotsman, Spaniard, American, Chinaman, Russian and a Frenchman were queing up to get into a night club. The bouncer looked at them and said "You can't come in here without a Thai!"

Extreme Spoons

In order to understand Extreme Spoons" you will first have to learn the less extreme game - Spoons. This is a card game and in fact could be any card game in which there are several players (three or more) where the game ends with one person disposing of all the cards in their hand. To turn any old run-of-the-mill card game into spoons you need a number of desert spoons which total one less than the number of players. So seven players requires six spoons and five players requires four spoons and so on. When the first person is "out" having disposed of their last card they shout "spoons" and they and all the other players grab for a spoon. The prinnciples of Musical Chairs now apply as there will be one person who is disappointed - that person is out until the next game. Play the card game again with one fewr player nad one less spoon and repeat until you have a winner.The attached diagram will help

To turn Spoons into Extreme Spoons (For this variation I am wholly indebted to the pupils of Peebles High School) you simply increase the distance between the card players and the spoons. So if you are school kid you play the card game bit in the canteen and place the spoons in a different part of the school as below

Of course you would need to be in the last year or two of school to play this as you would need to be able to intimidate the junior classes to leave the spoons alone.

The possibilities are endless. Students playing the cards bit in halls of residence and putting the spoons in a lecture hall. Office workers playing in the staff room with the spoons in the boss's office -my dream is to see youtube clips appearing of people playing Extreme Spoons.

If you enjoy this blog then help me become a millionaire by passing the address on to others

Sweets and Computers

Not you might think the obvious combination of subjects - the only link is that I am eating my way through  a box of Liquorice Allsorts whilst typing this. I absolutely love them except for the round ones with the liquorice centres that come in yellow and pink.

It isn't just liquorice all sorts - Jelly Babies are the same - there is always one flavour you just can't stand and you end up chucking them away. Why on earth can't they sell them loose and let you pick and choose which ones you want - that way of no-one bought the round liquorice allsorts in yello and pink the manufacturer will get the message and stop making them!

Computers - in an earlier post I mentioned the "outage" and how it mangled my internet connection. Well three weeks on and my company broadband is still not working. The solution from the geek team is to send me a thrid router - not at all convinced yet that this is the end of it!

Then today my good friend Jumbo Jock/ Darth Vader/Studdley returned my wife's beaten up old laptop after fixing it of a whjole host of problems looking like a brand new machine. Jumbo/Darth/Studdley trained as a pilot and he knows more about computers and how to fix them than any PC geek I know. But in reverse would you trust a PC geek to fly a jumbo jet???

The only safe place for a bloke!

This is one I have been meaning to write off an on for a while.

As a bloke you realise early on from your mother that your world revolves around avoiding trouble by doing chores. Not only doing chores but dong them straight away. When you grow up and marry you think, briefly, that now you are the boss and you can get away without the chores having to be done. Alas no! You now have a wife - in my case Mrs Blog who takes on the role previously performed by your mother. So, apart from a few years spent as a bachelor with a flat coverd in dust, a sink full of dishes, a fridge full of green cheese and a loo that you are embarrased by you are stuffed by the chores!

There is a safe place though where you are protected - lucky for me I discovered it early on in my life at about age 4. The safe place looks like this -

 Yes the loo! Once you are in there you are safe - no woman will ever dare disturb you in there! It must be something to do with them being in denial about the normal body functions or something. You do have to be careful though - I used this technique with my grandmother once too often. at the tender age of 5. After a significant period (somewhere between 30 mins and an hour I think) of chore-avoiding in the loo she came after me with remedies for constipation.

George and Me

Time for a middle aged rant.

After working at my present company, AXA, for six months I have been found out. It appears I have transgressed and disobeyed the rules - unwittingly I might add. Given that AXA is a French company you might be forgiven for thinking that there would be no rules at all. As the great Al Murray says "Where would we be if we had no rules? France!"

What was my crime? To bear more than a striking resemblance to a Hollywood star. For the last six months on the AXA UK group employee website my details have been listed for all to see - they can access my phone number, email address and until yesterday a photo of me. Here is the photo,-

Seems that someone was concerned that we might be sued by George Clooney for copyright abuse! As if! George if you are out there reading this can you let me know? So I had no choice but to change it to this,-

Which as you can see has been protected by copyright so that George cannot make money out me.