Back blogging thanks to a trip to London and a hotel that only had white bread.

New car running well, work going OK, sun shining so I thought I would organise the guys for a drink to celebrate Martin's fiftieth birthday last night.
 Somehow this caught the attention of the Spite Goblin who turned up at the pub disguised as the Beer Sprite (see very first post in January).

It was a great evening - good chat and banter until the spite goblin/beer sprite made me follow the guys to the Crown Pub across the road. I had paced my beers all night and was at just the right level of intoxication to sleep well and wake up fresh as a daisy. Once in the Crown they (my mates) started on Jager-bombers - a glass of Jagermeister served in a half-pint glass of Red Bull which you have to down in one.

Next thing I know, I have had three of these foul concoctions one after the other. Is is a miracle that I can type. Woke up at 5.00 a.m.; really wide awake - thanks to the caffeine in a pint and a half of Red Bull; really hungover thanks to the Jagermiester, beer and 10 year old Macallan. Not sure who my friends are ......

Thanks guys!

WBDS

This is a public service message. There is a little known killer illness out there - "White Bread Deprivation Syndrome"

The name of this illness speaks for itself. I have it. Ever since I made the huge mistake of telling Mrs Blog about my cholesterol rating from the Doctor she has been looking out for my diet. So, not only am I missing out on cheese, bacon and chocolate (not to mention sausages), I just ate the last slice of white bread; so that means brown granary bread for months to come.

My fond hope is that Mrs Blog will read this post and realise the error of her ways. If not you might not be hearing from me for a while.

The Buttocks of Doom

Daughter-blog has returned again to Aberdeen but not before causing utter chaos in the Blog household. She managed to lean her backside against the washing machine and break it. I would be failing in my civic duty if I did not warn the people of Aberdeen of this serious threat to their well-being.

In fact daughter -blog is a serious threat to her own well-being. She was so prone to falling over as a child that she inspired me to comment once,-
"She is the only person I know who could turn walking from the Kitchen to the Dining room, into an extreme sport"

The oil industry

I saw physio Mark again this week. He was telling me about a trip he had when he worked for Rangers Football Club. It seems he was put in business class on a flight to the US and ended up sitting next to a woman who started chatting to him.
"What do you do for a living?" she asked.
"I'm in oil" replied Mark.
After this she came on pretty strong - no doubt convinced that she had found a multi-millionaire. After a while she delved a little deeper into his work and asked what aspect of oil he worked in.
"Massage oil" he said "I am a physiotherapist"
Conversations ends.

HSUMITB

Almost everyday I try and do the Times Sudoku puzzle and more often than not I get distracted and to the word puzzle as well. Today you had to make at least 16 words of three letters or more and containing the letter U. Fine as far as it goes but you also needed to make at least one word using all the letters. Today the letters were the ones in the title of this posting. For the life of me all I could see no seven letter word except Bumshit and Shitbum for almost an hour before I got to Bismuth.

Weird people

Last night saw son-blog perform with the up and coming music sensation that is know as Armadillo. This is a seven-piece band that caused a stir in our local town two months ago when the local fuzz banned them from playing a gig AFTER they had already agreed to it! The reason given was lack of manpower to control the two hundred fans who might have had a drink or two. So having banned the gig they called in reserves to police the streets because there were two hundred fans wandering the streets with nothing to do but drink!!

Back to last night. Armadillo were playing first on the bill in support of Agitator and Stagger Rats at the pretty cool "Cabaret Voltaire" (known as CabVol) in Edinburgh's Blair Street.

Son-blog played the Saxalarm (See earlier post) and had a ball. Back stage one of the musicians from one of the other bands asked him if he knew anyone in Edinburgh who could sell him Ketamine! What an introduction to world of substance abuse - seventeen years old and he is supposed to know where to buy Horse-Tranquilisers on a Saturday night at 9.30 p.m.!! Still it gave me an idea for a blog...

Getting old

For the last fifteen years I have flown from Edinburgh airport to almost every destination in the UK. So much so that I consider air travel to be a specialist subject of mine.

"Yesterday though, it all went wrong. I arrived at the airport an hour before my flight to Southampton at 6.45 a.m.; went through security carefully picking our the shortest and quickest moving queue; bought my usual small cappuccino from my usual coffee bar; sat down with my laptop and sorted out a few emails and started on a report while I waited for the gate to be displayed. So far so good. When the gate was displayed I made my way there - gate 17 in the newer section of the airport. I sat by the gate and opened up my laptop and carried on with the report. After a while I checked the status of my flight and saw that it said "Final Call"

"Final Call" meant that I had missed the boarding announcement but no serious harm - you can still board when it shows "final call". When I went to the desk the lady from Servisair took my boarding pass and said "Sorry sir - this is the Norwich flight. The Southampton flight has closed".
"What? Why did you not make any announcements?" I replied
"We did sir - we made several asking for the last passenger to come to desk 17!"
"Ah!"
She then got on the radio to the dispatcher at the plane and ruined my day by getting them to send the bus back to gate 17 just for me. I had just thought I might get a much needed day at home and she spoiled it. Not only spoiled my day at home but guaranteed my ritual humiliation.
The bus turned up and on I got escorted by the lady from Servisair and under a baleful look from the driver that communicated "Spanner!!"
I got the same look from the pilot as I walked to the plane from the bus. Then once on the plane I faced the passengers who had, without exception, managed the relatively simple task of boarding far better than I had. My humiliation was completed by the "Walk of Shame" down the aisle - of course my seat was at the back of the plane because as a frequent flyer I have learned that it is the safest place to be.

My apologies to FlyBE, the passengers, Pilot, Co-pilot, Stewardesses, Dispatch team, Bus driver, Air Traffic Control and anyone who was trying to fly from Southampton to Edinburgh on the delayed inward bound flight.

Culinary Delights

Mrs Blog did a fine job last night preparing a great curry flavoured vegetable dish to go with chicken. (Not, alas the chicken stuffed with rocket of earlier blog fame).

However Mrs Blog declined this masterpiece, instead settling for a salad. But this was no ordinary salad - it contained shaved carrots! Which to my mind implies they needed a shave in the first place....

Hello Iran Again /سلام دوباره ايران

Somehow this site has become a sensation in Iran this month. Not being entirely sure who is reading it (they could be English speaking expats or more of the Iranian Secret police featured in the post of 21st March) - I thought I should welcome them in Persian/Farsi. If you are an Iranian reader please put up a comment to tell us who you are so that we can rule out the secret police...


...of course they could be tracking this blog because it mentioned Osama Bin Laden last week!! In which case it may be that the secret police in Iran (and possibly elsewhere) have search engines programmed to look for key words which they then investigate. In which case I may have just hit on a way to get my blog more hits than any other....

Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Terrorist, WMD, Jihad, Al Jazeera, Kalashnikov, M16, Cell.....

I will let you know how it goes!

You know who you are!

This will be a short post to protect the innocent and not so innocent.

The title says it all

Sunday Shopping

Sunday and the day of rest. Fat chance - Mrs Blog is after a day out shopping. I should be grateful since the outlay will be quite small - a mere £1, which compared to some shopping trips is a blessing.
Why, then, am I not grateful? Because she wants to go out and buy - Manure!
Yep - we are going Poo Shopping!!


(Afternoon update)

Mrs Blog cancelled the poo-shopping thank goodness. It turns our that manure contains everything you need to start weeds running rampant in the garden.

Just what you want at the end of a long hard week at work is to sit quietly with a beer and relax in your own home. This is precisely what I did not get.

It was a long hard week - it involved a full day course with my boss and a dozen others learning how to be less Nazi-like in our managerial style. The company wants us to be more personally responsible for actions and to develop our people. I bought into it and so did my boss. There was a point when I worried that he might actually have walked away thinking that the best way to get more out of your people was to be a really extreme Nazi. I will have to wait and see.

The relaxing with a beer went out of the window when son-blog turned up with a gang of  his friends. You have never seen a chocolate swiss roll pass from existence to oblivion faster. They ended up in the garden with sticks doing some kind of Ninja practice session. So immediately any chance of enjoying my beer in the garden was out of the window. More than that I was on tenterhooks waiting for one of them to come rushing in bleeding profusely



Today is daughter-blog's birthday - Happy Birthday Daughter-Blog. She is staying with friend-Heather who makes the most fantastic Chilli Jam.


Heather is an American studying at the "Centre for Modern Thought" in Aberdeen. She is a great ambassador for the US because she has a truly British sense of humour/humor. This was ably demonstrated when I asked her why there was a centre for studying a thought (singular) and really, with all those clever people, could they not study more than one? She has since taken up the implied challenge and is seeking to widen the curriculum whilst seeing the funny side.

Osama Bin Laden

This one is a serious post.

So OBL is dead and the general view in our press is that this was a good thing. We have, however, stepped over a mark as society.

The facts seem to be agreed,-

• The Americans went in to Pakistan to specifically assinate OBL
• They did not telll the Pakistani authorities
• OBL was unarmed
• OBL was shot in the head

All this might seem justified to rid the world of a "bad guy" who admitted master-minding the killing of thousands of people, however, it also sets a very dangerous moral precedent insofaras,-

• A foreign power carried out a military operation in another country without permission
• The operation was an execution
• There was no trial
• There was no UN resolution sanctioning an execution or assassination
• The ends are seen to justify the means

How long before some despot, dictator, lunatic ruler/regime decide to copy the Americans? After the "war on terror" being used  by Bush as an excuse to invade Afghanistan etc we saw Putin use the same reason for attacking his own people. More recently we heard Gadaffi suggest that he was fighting Al Qaeda whilst killing his own people.

Perhaps we need to stop and think?

Back Again

Been a bit busy lately and failed to post a number of times so I thought I should give a brief update on what you have been missing - which is really not a lot!

Last week son-blog dealt with a "Giant Spider" in the bath to prevent Mrs Blog having a fit. But then blew it by telling her it was 7.30 a.m. - she dashed about thinking she had overslept until she saw it was actually 6.30 a..m

Daughter- blog returned from a trip to Whitby. Among the photos she had was one of a display cabinet filled with religious memorabilia - statues of Mary and rosaries and so forth. One item that stood out in the shot was a bugle.
"Look" I said to her "The Trumpet of Jesus"
"Really!?" she replied (thirty seconds before the embarrassed blush started).


And then sadly we bade farewell to daughter-blog as she returned to Aberdeen with Mrs Blog driving her car with a boot full of cookery books.

Aberdeen is having a Rock Festival today - "Wow, what a cool city!" Alas no - it is a festival of Granite!!

Annoyances

Having been forced to drive daughter-blog to Edinburgh at the last minute this morning - all because she cannot work out how a bus timetable works - I had one of those annoying return journeys. You know the sort - slow drivers in front of view leaving you caught by red traffic lights, drivers who brake for no reason, people who drive at 45mph in 60 mph zones then carry on doing 45mph in 30 mph areas.

All of this was topped off by a really slow and wide Tesco van I was forced to follow for five miles. As I sat there behind it reading the writing on the back I realised it was not an ordinary van but a "Tesco Online Shopping" van. This is one of those that drops off your shopping once you have bought it on the internet - or at least that is what they tell you.

My only experience of using Tesco online was horrendous. The web page takes forever to complete and it would not let me choose my nearest Tesco instead it insisted I use one a further 8 miles away. Despite all this I thought - this is not too bad - sitting at home ordering the week's shopping and just relaxing till it turns up. I marvelled at the wonder of modern technology and all the clever people Tesco had employed with degrees in website design and IT. What I had not counted on was "Wee Jimmy" from Galashiels who is the guy who actually puts your shopping in the bags and pops it into the van.

"Wee Jimmy" does not have a degree in IT but he is in the responsible position of deciding what item he should place in your shopping if they are out of stock of something - and that is where it all went wrong...

Funny start to the day

Mrs Blog was up early again and so was Son-Blog which was more surprising given that he is 17. Not one to waste an opportunity I asked him if, rather than waking his sister up with a cup of tea, he would wake her with his saxophone. Always keen to oblige an again parent he did just that. In the process he created the "Saxalarm" and turned Daughter-Blog into a screaming banshee.

Of course as always in my life when I am responsible for a little mischief I am struck down by a cunning plan of the Spite Goblin. Today he sought his revenge while I was topping up the "Wee Box" with loose change. The "Wee Box" is a cardboard box with a slit for coins to go in which are collected for SCIAF. Our Wee Box was on the bread bin by the toaster and the S.G. made me drop a twenty pence piece in the toaster rather than the box. Undeterred, I simply turned the toaster upside down and got covered in four billion burnt bread crumbs. Will I ever learn?

More misunderstandings

Last Thursday I cooked supper for my son and I whilst Mrs Blog was away in Corsica retrieving daughter-blog from the Frenchies. By way of a change and bearing in mind my high cholesterol I opted for fish in a Keralan marinade. Not knowing what sort of fish they catch in Southern India I settled for good old cod. When Mrs Blog got home with charge in tow and had settled down she asked how we had been and what we had eaten while she was away. The following day she asked about the cooking again

"Where did you get the halibut?" she asked,
"Cod" I corrected her
"God?!!" said daughter-blog


And so began an evening of misunderstandiings - the highlights of which were Mrs Blog looking at a magazine and exclaiming that she had found an "easy tart"

Followed by suggesting that I should sniff "naughty Alice" - which gien that we number among our friends one who is called Alice (apologies to that Alice) made for a confusing moment. It took a while for me to be convinced thtat there really is a perfume called "Naughty Alice"

In order to prove a point I thought I would run a google image search on Naughty Alice - luckily it threw up this,-

Because with hindisght that could have been a whole lot worse!

Been quiet lately!

Not had much to write about lately but then I noticed that someone from Australia has visited this site and could not resist .....



Then my sister-in-law rang to tell me that she was living in half a house....

(Millie is the suicidal dog that lives with her and jumps out of second floor windows when left unattended.)

......and then the daughter who went to Corsica for three months came home bearing gifts. "Gifts" might be a more correct way of describing them - they consisted of a variety of foodstuffs given to her by Corsican well-wishers (no surprise given that she writes a food blog - see margin). Foodstuffs - you might be wondering  - "What exactly?"


Yes - sausages!



Bacon Cheese Chocolate

A couple of weeks ago I had a blood test and Friday saw me get the results from the same German doctor who saw "zee pus" in my tonsillitis diagnosis. She explained that my Cholesterol was high - a score above 5 is in need of action and 7 or 8 are serious heart attack. I got a 5.7 - no serious worries but she warned me off bacon, chocolate and cheese.
Great I thought  - I never eat bacon chocolate and cheese at the same time! Alas it turns out she meant indivdually I have to avoid bacon, chocolate and cheese.

Mrs Blog had been reading up on Cholesterol and decided to add biscuits and sausages to the list of proscribed items sinc ewhen life is not worth living.

Living in Scotland we hardly ever see the sun and when we do we make the most of it by dusting off the barbecue. Yesterday (Saturday) was just such a day. So first barbecue of the year and I cannot have sausages!

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!!