I've been looking at the amount of rubbish that I am producing and have to say that the bulk of it isn't absolutely all my fault. In an age when tossing a jam jar into a bin is tantamount to murder and not recycling newspapers carries a life sentance it's very hard to move these days without the risk of ending up on crimewatch. Every day I seem to attract my own body weight in refuse. If it doesn't come home in my shopping it is pushed through my door, leaves my body in a different form than it came in or is produced just by cleaning myself. I'm afraid the climate will just have to change without me as I'm sick of spinning the plates. I've reams of paper waiting for shredding and then what do I do with it? Give it to a hamster!
The ladyfriend and I had to visit the municipal dump at the weekend which to me is a bit like visiting people you're not all that keen on - you don't look forward to it but you enjoy it when you get there.
It's a very nice dump, they run a tight ship with different sections for this, that and the other. In a corner they have this Aladdin's cave of unwanted treasures which they have hoiked out of the skips. I've often drooled over these items. They have hundreds of golf clubs, chairs, tables, garden gnomes and the like. They also have a vast collection of skis which just goes to show how well the economy is doing.
This weekend they had a massive chandelier which must have come from a huge house - a little 70's in styling - but a thing of beauty all the same. The men had suspended it and it sparkled as it shook gently in the wind. It certainly injected a bit of much needed glamour as we tossed the garden clippings away.

tuppence a bag

I'm not having much luck with the birds. They are a fickle bunch. Before I went on holiday I was being eaten out of house and home. I had more than two in a bush I had a veritable Quality Street tin of varieties, finches, sparrows, crows, tits, robins but two weeks away and I've a lawn fall of peanuts going begging.
I know what's happened, during my break in the sun they've f*cked off to the neighbours garden, I've seen his nutbags swinging from the vantage point of my bedroom window and there's nothing I can do about it.
The pheasants have been loyal god love 'em, they've stuck by me a fact that I shall remember come the glorious 12th.

I'm like sooooooo loving YouTube, I was on it for hours last night. They've got videos of Barbra Streisand, Liza with a Z and Judy Garland! Fantastic. I've stuck a little movie of Verona up if you want to click here and see it, it's no great shakes but it's a little soupcon of my holiday. I have also stuck up my photos atlast click here.
I must apologise for not being much of a chatty cathy lately, I've lost it a bit since we got back. I'm out of the loop when it comes to social commentary and very rarely catch the news. I have been confining myself to the kitchen this week and have also been drinking heavily, the only enthusiasm I can muster is when I knock the wife around a bit....

There should be a decompression chamber for when people come home from their holidays, I feel ready to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I don't know if it's coming home to all this water but my little battery light is flashing red for danger. Anyhow, I'm cooking risotto tonight - a little taste of Italy - a reminder which I am hoping might lift me spirits.
Lake Garda was great, the hotel though became known as "Eagles Nest" to the Ladyfriend and I as there was such a high proportion of Germans staying there. They're funny buggers, they know how to occupy a beach, every morning I would awake gripped with fear that there would be no sun beds left. We would have to wade our way through their terry towelling which had been placed neatly at 4am and try and find ourselves a place without the whiff of sausage.
There were also rather a lot of pale Oirish children which would stay for a few days and then go off (I expect they were on their way to Rome to see their new Pope)they would run up and down on the way to use the water slide and I'm not kidding at one point I thought I was in a scene from Angela's bloody Ashes.
We left the compound often though, and took in as much of the Italian atmosphere that we could (before we went back to the hotel and our Eva Braun suite) we took a trip to Verona, the Dolomite Mountains and took boat trips around the lake. When we dined out the food was like a religious experience, I've never eaten pasta like it. The little towns were stunning, the buildings were jaw dropping and fig trees grew out of cracks in the pavement like weeds. Highly recommended.

The Ladyfriend and I are home from our holidays and what a swell time we've had. I'll write more for you tomorrow as I'm running a wee bit behind what with coming home on Saturday and seeing Ms Streisand last night, so enjoy this scene of Verona in the meantime.

but i do what i do toodeloo

I don't BELEEEEEEVVVEEEE IT! Liza with a Z is on the road and she aint doing London! I'd be happy to travel as far north as Leamington Spa but the great lady aint coming anywhere near UK airspace! What a disaster.
The ladyfriend and I are off to Italy tomorrow for two weeks so it's some consolation but the ciabatta will stick in me throat knowing that I'm going to miss out on the greatest show singer of all time - I mean WHAT a gene pool!

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!