Cup final tickets!

First come, first served - two tickets for the World Cup final! Click here to see the seats!

Food and HIV

Looking for a special recipe? Got a friend who is lactose or wheat intolerant? Well here's yer answer! My friend Dame Fandango is very close to finishing her website - Dame Fandango's Healthy Inclusive Recipes - selling a book with recipes for people who want dairy and gluten-free food - also some recipes available for free on the site. The link to HIV? Money from each sale is being given to the Ukuthasa charity in South Africa (right now the site doesn't say this as the news has just broken). Check out both and hit the contact link on the Dame's site to wish the team luck!

Anniversary

It's been a year since I started this blog and what a tumbledown, rumbledown rockabilly year it's been! To quote The Beach Boys - "Lenin has lived and Jehovah has died..............", my world has taken a few turns and changes too! People now stop me in the pub and ask why this blog hasn't been updated - hiya JW and Clerky and others!

Right now I'm assailed (good word for this time of night) by the sound of deadlines flying past and I'm wondering when we can adopt the metric week - I really need ten days each week and a hundred hours each day. Tennis elbow restricts the amount of typing I can do and sciatica make life a tad stressful and so I'm trying to concentrate on what I have to do rather than what I want to do. On the upside, I've found another City fan in the village and we're talking about starting a Bishopsbourne City Fan Club!

You'll have noticed a new link on the right, Amnesty International are looking at Internet censorship and it's worth checking out this new initiative - those of us who rely on the web need to make sure that we know who controls it. We've discussed censorship in the classroom but we need to be aware of how it impacts the wider world.

All up things are good in the world of Gibson and the courses I teach are drawing to a close so life should become a little easier soon - I can but hope.

Greetings to everyone and happy anniversary to me :-)

Alive!

Yes I'm still alive (I'll reply separately Anne :-)) but it's hectic here at Gibson Towers in bijou Bishopsbourne. The ongoing car saga continues with more exhaust work being needed this week (I'm waiting for the Kwik Fit area manager to investigate my complaint before going into further details but suffice to say I'm not a happy teddy). Work is cool but I still have legacy stuff to sort so I feel as though I'm doing 8 day weeks all the time right now. Things might get calmer once the next assignment is submitted and the courses I'm tutoring are finished for this year (June) but there are a few more mountains to climb before I get there.

Local stuff - this is the school child 2 attends. No end of problems with her tablet PC and I'm on standy-by to pop into the school to have a high level discussion about the technical incompetence of their IT team or a low level discussion where I extend their vocabulary and show them why upsetting stressed Mancunians is a bad plan in the whole scheme of things. For my children I will forget my Buddhist leanings and tear someone a new face.

Many of you know that I host some photos of Bishopsbourne (playground of the glitterati) on my site and that I occasionally attract mails from people who have lived here. The latest has led to a dialogue between Mark and someone who was in the Barnados home during the war. To hack a long story into a manageable size - during the war a Spitfire was shot down near the village and Mark has researched the event so now we have the name and details of the pilot. Eventually I hope to have the details of the discussion and the story of the Spitfire on some web space somewhere.

The new cricket season has started but I still don't have the fixture list so I can't update the site - the first two games were called off, one because the other side couldn't field a team and last weekend the weather conspired against Bish. Maybe this Sunday the bank manager can convene a meeting.

Stuff

Loads of stuff to try and cram in so here goes.

Car stuff first - the bodywork will take a week to fix and just to add to the fun the exhaust fell apart on Sunday while driving across a field at Lydden Hill.

England Manager - McClaren got it for one reason and one reason only - my mum is Scottish and was thus disbarred, otherwise she has similar credentials in that she's not won anything as a football manager.

If you want to see what happens when you and yours are out and about, gadding, you need only invest in the Pupillo and a 3G phone. How good is that? Hook your phone up to a webcam, using a video call, to show your empty home and fill those awkward silences between the visit of the waitress while enjoying the latest special at Pizza Express.

Some thanks

Okay - first up.

Thanks to anyone still hanging around here wondering whether or not I'm ever going to post again.

Thanks to those who have mailed me to ask if I'm okay.

No thanks to the bloke who drove into me on the roundabout on the way home tonight but thanks to Charles Clarke for giving me a giggle while trying to balance the call for biometric ID cards with the idea that, despite having people banged up, he administered a system which failed to deport known criminals.

But the biggest thanks have to go to Two Jags. When those of us who are of a certain age and shape see young, fit guys enjoying the company of ladies we tend to nod and accept that this is the natural order but when we see John Prescott, a man who even he himself wouldn't describe as a young Adonis, being hounded because he's been courting an attractive young lady it gives us all hope - however fleeting and brief. The natural order has been attacked, the fat bloke got the girl - albeit because of power and politics and that should be something we all celebrate shouldn't it?

17/04

The anniversary of Apollo 13 splashing down and a Bank Holiday in the UK this year! Enjoy!

Slack blogging again

No excuse - just busy.

Degree ceremony today so here's me in the gear - BSc gown from the Open University, all being well I'll be qualified for a different one next year

Marathon and on and on.

Don't forget to sponsor Gill in the London marathon - the money is for a good cause (great cause actually). If you drink just think of it as the price of a few beers or a few peach martinis. If you smoke donate the price of a day's ciggies. If you work how about an hour's pay and if you drive how about a couple of gallons of petrol. The Children's Society do some amazing things for people who need stuf and help far more than most of us - go on, you know it makes sense and the more good you do in life the more good you get back.

Assignment update!

Two thirds finished with five hours to the cut-off. Amazon order arrived but I've resisted the temptation to watch the DVDs or start the book. Just turned down a plae at the "Wine & Wisdom" tonight, someone has dropped out but it would be terribly irresponsible to go and do that until this assignment is done and dusted and today I'm wearing my "responsible" hat - it gets so little use that it is clean and neat and doesn't fit very well but I'll give it a go. Of course that doesn't mean I'm not involved in other displacement activities of which posting this is one.

In other news; Jackie has printed off the post about The Mermaid so that Steve can read it - he struggles to look at any screen which isn't showing live sport - and she thinks that the part about every 20th customer getting a friendly greeting from Steve is over the top but she's hoping he can aspire to such a high hit rate, it's currently one friendly greetng every 20 days by her estimation. (Seriously - it's a very friendly pub)

Anniversaries

Some of you guys were here in October when I celebrated a year here so lets raise a glass to another one (or two?) anniversaries. 23/10 was the anniversary of my wife and I separating and while it's not something I'd count in the great things I've done it means that I can now apply for a "quickie" divorce and move on. So wherever you are - cheers! Here's to the next few years - per ardua ad astra!

Sold out?

After 11 months without a "go out to work" job I've been offered and accepted a part time (2.5 days/week) job to help deal with the mounting costs associated with my debauched lifestyle. Not negotiated which days and on one each week I'll be working until eight PM - it's also not local but that's no big deal. It's with an organization that I have an emotional link with and I know a lot of the people there so it'll be cooler than a cool thing wearing a cool hat and cool coat and sucking a cool pill after a day at cool school. Because these things always arrive in bunches - rather like bananas - I'm also at the early stages of discussing an idea for a web based business, if that works out my ambition to earn money whilst sleeping is one step closer. Clearly all this activity may curtail my already haphazard blogging but that's part of the price I'll have to pay.

Child cruelty

I was going to ask which country the following applies to:

A child is killed by a gun every three hours. According to the latest statistics, nearly 1,000 children under 19 are shot dead every year. Another 800 use guns to commit suicide, and more than 160 die in firearm accidents.

But frankly I find it so horrific I don't want to mess about. It's America of course and comes from a piece in The Guardian today. The piece is about a 66 year old man who shot a 19 year old for crossing his lawn. He shot him, with a shotgun, from his house and then walked over to the felled boy and shot him again from close range. That figure of 1,000 under 19s a year is a greater average than the number of US soliders who have died in Iraq in four years (approx 2,500). I'm not going to add anything else - I'm sure there are a range of views on this but gun controls in the States are being eroded so these numbers can only get worse. I'm very glad my children do not live in a country where 40% of the populace own a gun and over 30,000 people were killed by firearms in 2003.

Washes whiter than white!

Cleans better than anything else and still respects you in the morning! Too good to be true? Who cares! I don't have the ASA on my back :-)

The Mermaid is reopened in all its wonderful glory. Those who saw my photo of studying in the pub this time last year will miss that old piece of bar but the new, improved, Mermaid is bigger and boasts a non-smoking area that will be the envy of Kent. It is now posible to get to the terracota rooms from what was "behind the bar" and a pint of the finest Masterbrew in the county is still only GBP 2.20! Parking is still best near the church (rather than outside my house) and coach parties should ring before arriving - well behaved walkers or children are welcome, Steve has promised that every twentieth customer will get a friendly greeting (the other nineteen will be treated like regulars and thus take their chances!). Visit The Mermaid, buy me a beer - you know it makes sense!

Thing!

Blogger is wobblier than a wobbly thing with a wobbly hat! Posting this by email to see it works but I can't get into Blogger dashboard to post on the web :-(

Later: Message now tidied up as Blogger is back up

Just what you need!

Of course Nog's Blog is dedicated to delivering solutions to meet your every need (quite in Canada perlease!!!! - We don't need your mucky interventions :-)))). Anyway, in our endless search for good stuff our Bavarian based contributor has offered a "Mission Statement generator" - you know it makes sense! No more wandering the corridors wondering about what it all means, no more endless meetings trying to determine why you were employed by that company. Here is the online answer to organizational blues! Give it a whizz!

Coincidences

On Friday I spoke to Stuart who lives in Sheffield, he invited me to his wedding - it's on my birthday! Strange or what? Stuart was heading to his brother's pub to celebrate his brother's 50th birthday. On Sunday evening I was watching Midsomer Murders and Steve's pub was featured throught this episode! Spooky!

Snow joke!

Grief but it was cold! Not sure if you can see the snow in this photo but it was there! Tough, scrappy game with Canterbury playing uphill in the first half and leading by a couple of points at the turn. In 5 blistering minutes at the start of the second half they scored two tries and the contest was over. Final score: 24 - 7, the Staines number 13 was sin binned twice, Canterbury's Jamie Forsyth carried off with an injury in the final 10 minutes and Calum managed to eat 4 mini pork pies in the first half - a personal record!

But God doesn't think he's Blair

Sorry this is late - the email flagging this up went to an account that seems to redirect some stuff but not all of it. Thanks for the link Bluefluff!

Anyway - this is from the Guardian on Wednesday:

"If Tony Blair thinks his friendship with George W Bush is worth rubbing out a couple of hundred thousand Iraqi men, women and children, then that's something he can talk over with me later," said God. "But when he starts publicly claiming that's the way I do the arithmetic too, it's time I put my foot down!" It is well known that God has a very big foot.

Grab it here

Carpet picnics

Carpet picnics are great aren't they? I've got Calum with me so we decided on a proper boyz night in; beer, pizza, garlic bread and a good film.

The cheapo DVD/TV combo is playing up - DVDs cut out and the football results are variable - so I put the lappy on the floor in front of the fire and we had the pizza and garlic bread there too. Great film - loads of chases, technology, action, love interest and gun fire - I can strongly recommend "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" but Ill have to watch the end again as I dozed off.

Rugby later today. Canterbury are standing proud at the top of London 1 and looking good for promotion, today's opponents are Staines - for those who don't know that's an idyllic little coastal town well away from the hubub of the modern world with it's own rustic charm and rural ambience, those who know it may have a slightly more jaundiced view. 15:00 this afternoon if anyone wants to watch a great game for only a few quid - if you come along say "hello".