I've trouble with the feet. They've gone all hard and gnarly. I look like I've been walking barefoot in the bush with Jenny Agutter, it's not nice. So last night I sat watching the telly with my feet in a washing up bowl with all kinds of surfactants swilling about to get them super soft, I even bought a cream with horse piss in it (it says Urea on the tube so I'm hoping it's from Black Beauty and not an African gentleman piddling in a bucket on the minimum wage.)
I'm hoping they'll bounce back, my feet were once a source of great pride to me but, like many aspects of my body, have run to seed with neglect.

People have been harping on about Tony Blair's legacy and I reckon the thing I will remember him for the most is not curing ricketts, the abolishion of clause 28 or creating the homogonised high street but the law that was passed yesterday - The ban on smoking in public places! I've lost count of the times when a 'friend' has said "do you mind if I smoke?" and I've hated every sodding second of it and sitting with a smile on my face when I'd prefer to be ramming an ashtray between someone's puckered lips. It's great news indeed. Clean air. Now the only peasouper you'll see in a restaurant will be the eat with a spoon kind.

I've got trench foot. The Ladyfriend and I went to Louise and Jamie's wedding on Saturday - please click here for pictures - and it rained, heavily. I've never seen rain like it, it fell in Biblical proportions. It didn't spoil a thing mind you. Infact, I've never been to a better wedding. It felt like Carry On up the Khyber as we sat dining in a marquee whilst outside merry hell was let loose. It was thunder and lightening but it wasn't very frightening. It was British stiff upper lip stuff. What made it all the more poignant was that the marquee was erected on a cricket pitch with the lavvies in the pavillion. Between courses I had to answer the call of nature which meant me, a brolly, with my chin up walking barefoot across silly point, you can't get anything more English than that.
It was a bit of a late night - the skin was set like cement on the top of the Ovaltine - so I'll wind up now but if you want to see a bit of wedding dancing click here

Vic just a Minute get in touch, I've lost your email!

On my lunch time walk to Tesco I stepped on something. It made me skid slightly and my immediate thought was that I had happened upon some dogs mess and I would spend the best part of this week trying to be rid of its odour. I couldn't look down and kept on walking, if I had examined my sole it would have been obvious to passing traffic that I had trodden in dog muck and I couldn't have that.
I carried on walking scrapping my right foot slightly. I kept thinking though that it couldn't have been dog muck as the texture wasn't quite right, I decided that it was a mouse, frog or baby bird which in a way was worse.
On my way back from the supermarket I retraced my steps half not wanting to see the horror that awaited me but determined to put my mind to rest. I held my breath at the point of insertion and saw a big old soggy piece of ginger. How odd and how sad that someone's tea had been ruined.

It was the Ladyfriend's mother's birthday on wednesday and as she is advanced in years the only place to take the old girl was the Harvester restaurant. They serve simple fayre there and she likes to suck on Fish and Chips - everything else is too hard. As a special treat we decided to take the car out to Windsor and go to the Virginia Water branch, this was a bad idea, it was packed to the rafters. We don't like waiting so we went back to a Toby Carvery which we passed enroute.
From the outside it looked menacing, CCTV cameras adorned every corner of the building but we were starving so we went in.
Whilst we were digesting God only knows how many strains of growth hormones I watched through the window at a car that had pulled up. A group of boys got out. I sneered at them (I tend to do this with the young a lot these days) but as they came nearer I realised that they were the group Eton Road who failed to win last year's X Factor.
They looked ever so tired and I daresay they had just come back from perfoming in a dive of a gay club in Magaluf. One of them came in and spoke to the waitress. I can't be sure, but I think they asked for a secluded area so that they would not be ambushed by fans. This made me laugh. We left at this point so we will never know if they put on an impromptu concert or not. Bless 'em, this time next year one of them will probably be working there.

I've been dabbling with Facebook - I've been slipping off the cultural radar just lately so I thought I'd take the plunge and see what all the fuss is about. I've got myself a profile now and have a few friends already. You can ask people to be your pal, I've approached Morrissey but I'm not holding out too much hope there, he seems a closed book.

Spend Spend Spend

The flat's sold, the money's in the bank and so the ladyfriend and I set off to a monstrous shopping mall yesterday to spend, spend, spend. Our plan was an orgy of consumption, to return home with hands slashed to ribbons by the weight of shopping bag handles, ears ringing with the sound of the tills and hair all static like having tried on too many man made fibres......but no, we were hard pushed to shell out £50.
We were in a position to let loose the gross national product of a small african country but the biggest purchase we made all day was the parking ticket. This won't do, this won't do at all.
We ended up on the NEXT website when we got home and ordered a few slacks from there, it wasn't quite as much fun but it gave us a sense of fullness. The catalogue is a big bugger, it came at the weekend. I love big post. I get an enormous thrill from large parcels, it is indeed one of my favourite things. So you can imagine my fury when the ladyfriend's mum - who has old timer's - thought it was hers and opened it! I was beside myself.

I am fortunate enough to be able to walk to work and in the mornings I pass by several mums and their kids on the way to school. It's great in itself that they do not clog the roads but these are the sort of mums who don't run a car if you know what I mean? Well, if I have to spell it out they are pikey types, single mothers, chavs whatever the vernacular is. Their little convoys of children of all nationalities rumble along with a peppering of blue language but this is not my problem, what I find the most offensive is the fabric softener.
I have noticed that people who smoke heavily think that a couple of generous cupfulls of conditioner in their wash will mask the fact that their house smells like a packet of streaky bacon. This is all well and good if you can afford the good stuff but the young mums I pass can only run to blue stripe. It's a good five minutes before it clears, they are mere spots on the horizon and cheap jasmine florabunda still clings to the air.

This weekend the Ladyfriend and I hired a ford transit van to move our stuff out of the flat in Eastbourne. I must say we made a good couple of truckers. It was fantastic. At first I was more than a little apprehensive when I saw the size of the beast having never driven an estate car let alone a bloody great van but after a few minutes I was in love. It's a completely different motoring experience, you can see for miles, over the tops of hedgerows and into other cars to ooogle the crumpet, magic.
Four days to go and our seaside retreat will be ours no more - along with the associated bills and stress. It's been fun helping to inflate property prices so the locals can not afford them and enlarge our carbon footprint on the M25 but I will be glad to see the back of it.

I've have decided to dislike a man at work solely because when he stirs his tea he noisily stirs the inside of the mug and not the liquid. I hate that, it's finger nails down a black board to me. A few noises get on my nerves. I can't stand wine being opened and then pored on tv programmes - especially soap operas - the glug, glug, glug as it goes into a glass sends me reeling.
I used to hate the introduction to John Craven's Newsround I can remember quite clearly diving to the floor with two cushions over my ears, I can recall the smell of the carpet even now. That music was manic, torture and then he'd coming on with a serious expression peddling dumbed down news. I like John Craven now though, I do like an episode of Country File of a Sunday, I believe he's found a niche there I reckon he's best kept away from kiddies.

I've just popped in to a gym which is doing a 14 day free trial, I thought I'd express an interest as one needs to 'get fizzical' if I am to lose the muffin top.
It was horrible, I was shown around by a grubby little man who didn't look like he used the equipment he was trying to peddle. A skinny young woman clad in a tracksuit hung in the shadows examining her nails. I think she was the beautician although she looked like she would be more at home pushing a pram along Margate pier than amongst the lotions and potions - she had peculiar shaped eye brows with a constant look of either surprise or the effect of a nuclear blast.
The bloke was showing me the different payment options and as he babbled on I daydreamed to myself thinking "I'm not going for any of it mate" and "I'll just scarper" when he asked me which one I thought I'd go for! I hadn't listened to a word. In the end I'm booked in for one of these inductions - it was that or I'd still be in there now.

Never mix, never worry!

The ladyfriend brought poison into the house last night, she had a four pack of lager - she may as well have brought home a loaded gun. I've been tea total now for over a month and whilst I may not have the physique of a young Debora Kerr I have nipped in a little at the waist. I blame my bulge on the booze. We are off on holiday in six weeks so time is against me. I need to trim down if I am not scare the children in the hotel restaurant - and if I am to get a seat on the plane!

I've been rummaging in the bargain bucket at PC World and am now addicted to a computer game called 'Fable - the lost chapters'. I've been playing it so much that when I try to go to sleep at night I can still see it, it makes me feel a bit giddy.
I have not got a clue how to play it properly and I can't track down some mushrooms and I'm sick of killing manic wasps but it's all consuming, it's also led to me cutting corners in the kitchen so meal times have been lack lustre for the ladyfriend and I've missed Ugly Betty too!

no cows = no countryside

I've got a shoulder of lamb in the oven. It's pissing buckets outside and as the cooking process is considerable I now have a few hours to fester before tea's up. I'm following a recipe by Alistair Hendy (pictured) who I rather admire, it's a no nonsense cookery book - no frills as it were.
I bought the lamb from the dreaded Tesco supermarket, it's organic and it was in the reduced section and should have been used by two days ago but what the hey. It did smell a little bovine which I take to be the scent of all that lovely lush grass the little chap had induced.
I'm itching to get my hands on a bit of old mutton (apart from the ladyfriend - just joking!) Mutton is the new black don't cha know? I'm hoping I can track it down from a local butcher. It's available to buy on the internet but I don't like the idea of meat coming through the post, chops through the letterbox is a bit of a turn off for me.
These Organic Vegetable boxes screw my nose up a bit too. A couple of old turnips and a butternut squash to make the middle classes feel ethical. I watched a woman buying goat's milk the other day in the supermarket and she looked like she'd be better off up a mountain with a bell around her neck. I deliberately didn't buy a Fairtrade pineapple today and plumped for the one which had resulted in the most exploitation instead. I don't know why, a random act of nastiness. I'm up for a bit of Fair Trade as long as it's for British Farmers these days. No more of this foreign muck and bitter old tea bags.

Along with good food programmes on my new Sky Tv there are also bad ones. I have an intense dislike of Antony Worrall Thompson - never trust a man who breathes loudly through his nose - I view Ainsley Harriott with a mixture of disgust and alarm and I can't stand that barrow boy with John Torode...for that matter I don't like John Torode either, again never trust a man who clunks his teeth on cutlery. BUT the mother of all bad food programmes at the moment is Market Kitchen.
There is a bloke on it called Matt Tebutt who really gets my goat cheese. He's nasty to fellow presenter Tana Ramsay (the wife of the omnipresent Gordon Ramsay) and he's just an utter twit. He wafts the his hand over the frying pan to smell the food whilst he's cooking and when he tastes it he takes a huge step back and jigs his arm in amazement. Yuk, yuk.
I'm rather fed up with the words "seasonal" "organic" "source" and farmers markets too. I agree with them whole heartedly, don't get me wrong, I just can't stand foodies. I went to Borough Market last year and lasted five minutes, yuppies buying yoghurt that's all it was. I love Hugh, Nigel, Jamie, Delia, Ina and Nigella but my God they've created a monster.

Christmasses are all coming at once for the Ladyfriend. The hot news today is that Bette Midler has signed a two year deal to appear at Caesar's Palace from next February! It will just take Shirley Bassey to tread the boards and it will be a veritable hat trick of joy.
I've never been to America, I've always viewed the vast country with caution preferring to watch it from the long grass but it looks like I shall creating a whopping carbon footprint in 2008.
As a there there for selling the flat the ladyfriend and I decided that we'd tour the globe doing as many Pride festivals as we could so it will be on this note that we shall head west. I've always wanted to go to San Francisco since reading the Tales of the City books so it's June for the aeroplane zoom.

Well Hello Dolly! The Ladyfriend and I have got tickets to see Baaaaaaaarbra! We had to pay through the nose (if you pardon the expression) but it's worth it. It has always been the Ladyfriend's dream to see Babs so she's gone and blown the housekeeping on her. I don't mind though, I'm not a huge fan but I've never been to the millennium dome so it will be quite nice alround, I'm quite looking forward to it. The Ladyfriend is beside herself.

More talk of May Polls only this one is of an election kind. It's the local elections today. I like these ones, I've been sent many cheery missives from average looking people anxious to represent me on the council. I've had hand written foolscap stuffed into envelopes by the elderly with mediocre office skills but with bags of enthusiasm and I've had some silly old sod ring my door bell asking me to stick a poster in my window. Down in Eastbourne there is a hardened Tory who sticks up a huge Conservative hoarding in his front garden. It's massive, but still has the old Neo-Nazi torch logo on and not the new squibbly tree. It's all about branding you know.
When I think of town halls and councils I always picture huge tea urns and small talk, town twinning and by-passes. I daresay a lot more goes on and a lot more of it goes on underhand but it's a cosey image that I'd like to keep. Thumping Grandfather clocks, bee's wax and people who look like Stephen Fry.

Sumer is icumen in - Happy May Day! I do love a May Day, no Jack In the Green for us this year, we shall all have to sit behind our desks instead of mincing around the may pole.
Last night, instead of preparing a may day hat, I was surfing the internet and found a very strange book for kiddies about the life of Shirley Bassey! I love Shirley - her new record is ace and I'm pleased as punch that her new album has got her cover of the Pink song from the M&S ad on - but I'm not sure her life and times makes good bedtime story material. This is the website that I found it on click here