Add A Little Ginger To Your Day…

Just because I was born in London and enjoy a healthy diet of fish & chips and bad teeth*, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have an obsession with discussing all things meteorological.

(*really, come on, our teeth are fine, STFU already.)

Having said that, I think that summer has well and truly passed us by already this year. It started raining this morning – it’s not stopped yet and it’s now 1:30am the next day. In fact it’s raining so hard at the moment that a small sea has formed outside the front door and stretches all the way to the end of my road. This evening it has cacked it down so hard that at one point it sounded like a lake was falling out of the sky.

Seriously, I want my fucking money back: where the piss did my summer go? Or was it here over those 5 days we were away in France for? I wouldn’t be surprised. I know I’m not supposed to go out in strong heat, y’know pale skin, sparkling, all that, but I love hot sunshine. Love the heat. I went to Tunisia a few years back and the day we arrived it was 52 degrees. FIFTY TWO. And that’s in celsius. It was so hot for the entire two weeks that I could barely stomach a whole beer per day. Now that to me is frightening- if I’m not putting away at least a six pack by the pool then something is clearly wrong with my holiday.

So this, this…abomination that we’ve called a summer is pretty piss-poor in my opinion. I know it’s a far cry from the Hoth like environment at the beginning of the year where we all struggled to get into work because no one could be arsed to go outside in minus 10 conditions (admit it, it wasn’t the transport, it was your duvet) but still when Boots is packed to the pharmacy with Ambre Solaire you kind of expect to be able to wear a pair of shorts, don’t you?

Don’t worry, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend coming up. It can’t get much worse.

Can it?

Hmm. I’m working on it alright, bear with me.

It’s been quite some time since the last overhaul of this website so I figured it was time to brush all the crap off the part of my brain that knows which bit of PHP goes where and polish FOTN up a little. Fortunately CSS no longer seems to be the utter mystery it used to all those years ago so it doesn’t take hours of frustration when something ends up right at the bottom of the page and I end up emailing Marty to fix it.

I’m hoping to remove this stupid left sidebar and add the date to the post title above – the lines are bugging me, I don’t mess around with categories or tags and you don’t need to know that “Rich” posted this cause unless Tania figures out how to get in here no one else is going to bother (come to think of it she’s not going to bother either…). (Done)

I’d like to add a Gallery link to the menu bar at the top which displays a live feed from veryfishy’s archives page – full of thumbnails that link back to their images. (Done…sort of)

One thing at a time eh, let’s sort a fabulous picture of me to go on here first.

Mm? Oh it’s you guys! Hang on, just finishing shaving. Think I’ve got about a month and a half’s growth on here. That’s metaphorically AND physically; I’ve literally just had a shave and I’m also trying to wake my writer’s mind at the same time. You get the picture.

A lot of writers say that their best inspiration comes when they’re in the shower or the bath. Or shitfaced on opium. My inspiration hasn’t come from dozing in hot water but a mental kick in the arse to actually WRITE something has. I do get a little complacent, apologies. Long time readers will already know this of course.

The good news is that my head is clear to use the keyboard, the better news is that I didn’t have to suffer too long without my beloved iPhone before the time came to queue for two hours to get my grubby hands on the new iPhone 4. Yes it was worth every second of the wait and no I won’t bore you with minute details of how I almost got a semi peeling back the protective plastic film from the screen. What I am still waiting for is a viable, stable jailbreak option to become available so I can upload all of my third-party goodness back onto my pocket lifesaver. Especially so I can re-tether the thing to my iPad, which is getting lonely without it’s wifi on the train in the mornings.

Hmm? Bad news? Oh right, yeah, you get that to balance the good don’t you. Hmpf. Well the crappy news is that my back is totally banjaxed. MRIs have been done, consultancies have been sat in on and the next step to talk to Mr Surgeon will be in September. Bit of a wait but when you consider is country’s health service it’s actually borderline speedy. The possibility of Lumbar Spinal Fusion looms before me. I am not going to provide you with links. You can Google that shit until you’re disgusted, I’m not hunting for it again. For example, if they decide to do ‘anterior’ then the go in to fix my spine THROUGH MY TUMMY. Gah! Then there’s the meds I’m on at present; no more pills, no more rattling or dry swallowing, oh no. Now I look like a reformed smoker when I take my shirt off with big old patches on my chest and arms. It’s good stuff but it’s not quite getting through to the core of the pain. I guess it never will, it’s sort of like an old, old bully following me around now. I guess i just have to learn to ignore him.

People say I whine a lot in real life (& I know I do!) so that’s all the whining for this entry, lest my online presence become bitter through my voice.

The brighter note at the end of this entry will be my new YouTube channel, which at the moment is reserved mostly for Beatriz. After discovering the incredible resolution of the video camera in my new phone I figured it’s finally time to get some footage online. So you can find her online here and if you fancy following the Twitterings of a one year old then make friends with her @theqweenbee. Careful though, she does bite.

On Monday I had the AWESOME idea of packing up my iPhone 3G and sending it off to O2 in exchange for Some Pounds. I thought I’d send the little guy off in style so I scrounged a little box and some packing foam to secure him in. Yes it’s a little nerdy but I thought I’d cut out exact shapes for the UK plug and power adapter:

Godawful photos, my apologies, they’re from my Crapberry (more on that in a bit). Having gotten my accessories nice & snug, time to wrap up that little fella:

And finally, waving goodbye at the Post Office *sniff*:

Done. Gone. I sort of wished the phone had been left on so I could track it online as it found its way to its new home.

I’ve bitched and moaned about my 3G since 3.1 was installed on it; it’s been nothing but trouble – clogged memory, crashing apps, a keyboard that just could not keep up with my typing and a signal that drops off in a train tunnel and needs putting into Airplane Mode to get back again. But boy do I miss it already. I’ve been using my work Blackberry Bold since Monday afternoon and can’t so much as ping a Twitter update from it. It does phone calls, it does text messages. That’s pretty much it. I can’t be doing with reconfiguring the thing to work with O2′s network instead of Vodafone’s so that’s mostly my fault, but frankly even if I had a data connection I’d be moved to tears at how shitty the interface is.

There’s a lot of people out there who have no idea how lucky they are to have an iPhone. I’m not saying it’s a life changer and an essential accessory, but once it’s in your life you’d better pray it stays there.

Having been home and back at work for a whole week since we drove all the way to and from fracking Cape Town a damned long way, I rather fancy taking another holiday..

I’ve got some pics from the trip to show off but I’ll try not to bore you with all of them, you know what I’m like with a camera (4 gig CF card? PAH!). First up, our awesome villa:

Big enough to sleep 8 people, we pretty much rattled around in here with our choice of bedrooms – B got the master suite I believe, with adjoining shower, awful singing voice though. She also got her taste of the swimming pool, eventually. Screamed her head off every time she got near the thing, so we were more than satisfied when she got in for 10 minutes on the last day:

Actually even I wasn’t brave enough to get into what felt like sub-zero water – Tania was loving it but I managed about 3 minutes less than B did. She looks on here in despair and wrapped up in a nice fluffy towel:

As for my two girls they had tons of fun together:

Whilst I consumed enormous packs of cheap French lager and bags of snacks.

As the weather wasn’t fantastic we did have to spend a bit of time indoors. Some of us got cabin fever more than the others:

When the sun did make an appearance all three of us would rush out to the deck and scrabble onto our sun loungers before Ze Germans showed up. Which was totally unnecessary as we had our own private loungers around our own private pool – but you never know; they’re sneaky those Europeans with their towels.

Not having to lug a whole bag full of books around was another bonus to this trip, the first with my iPad which was loaded with almost the complete works of Stephen King and Bill Bryson thanks to the awesomeness that is Dropbox combined with GoodReader. I’ve named my iPad MJOLNIR by the way..so nerdy. Anyone not use Dropbox? Be ashamed of yourselves – it’s a free chunk of 2 gig of online storage with accompanying iPhone/iPod/iPad/iToaster apps that all sync with your computer’s desktop. Of course there are other cloud storage solutions, such as Microsoft’s new SkyDrive system which features a whopping 25 gig of space to play with (that I’ll certainly be looking into) but none with as slick iOS applications as this.

Of course you can’t go on holiday without hitting the beach a couple of times. A path wound its way through the immense pine forest for a couple of kilometres until it reached huge sand dunes and, finally, the broad expanse of the Atlantic. Tania and I took advantage of some fabulous weather to make the hike with little B up on my back pulling at my ears and shouting encouragement. Here’s the reward at the end of a hard walk:

And the day we finally made it right onto the beach was, well a little windy would be an understatement. Someone decided to crawl inside my hoody for protection:

Ok, enough cuteness. The drive home was oddly a little easier than we expected. No messing around looking for supermarkets and we even shunned most of the toll roads in hope of saving a few Euros and seeing some of the gorgeous countryside. an 0500 start got us to Calais five minutes ahead of our ETA of 1900; that’s 14 hours and still 5 minutes early…well I was impressed.

I think it’s safe to say that while we would love to return in the future to handsome log cabins in the pine woods beside a bracing sea, I think Tania and I agree on getting a plane and a hire car – if only to cut down on the amount of Red Bull consumed.

IN WHICH OUR EPONYMOUS HERO IS DRIVEN TO NEAR MADNESS.

*may contain scenes of violence and unusually heavy petting*

I must say the one person I would have expected to be pretty whingy and moany after 7 or 8 hours driving with only a couple of food and poop stops wasn’t at all…and neither was B. Little Miss behaved so, so well throughout the entire journey that at some points we thought she’d actually escaped and was hitchhiking her way to a life of absinthe, poetry and expressionism. Tania on the other hand gets très grumpy if she doesn’t eat at regular intervals. Then again I just get grumpy and she has to deal with that constantly so I doff my hat to her.

By the way you can’t write that many words while the coffee’s on, I’ve had two pots (FRESHPOTTTTTTS) and am now on the cheap bière – yes it’s past midday and even if it weren’t (like yesterday) I don’t care, I’m on holiday.

Also I’ve just been assaulted by my wife, reading this over my shoulder and assuming because she saw her name and the word grumpy in proximity to each other that I am being mean. Told you she gets grumpy.

So 7 or 8 hours in (I forget precisely how much because we were having SO much fun..) little did we know that we had almost as much again left to go. Fortunately a fair chunk of this was uneventful; I managed to sleep for A WHOLE FORTY MINUTES while riding shotgun but the damned tolls kept appearing. Now as a British driver I am used to two types of tolls: one where you pay to go over a massive bridge or under a tunnel and one where you pay to get into “another country”. What i am unaccustomed to, since we pay our annual road tax, is stopping every few hundred kilometres to fork over a shed load of Euros. To be fair to the French, their motorways are awesome; not as good as Ze Germans but far, FAR better than our embarrassment of a road network. Nonetheless, it’s still a little galling (heh, see what I did there) to have to dump roughly €50 of our holiday cash on the “luxury” of driving your own car across a country.

Tolls and service stations aside the motorways of France are gleaming jewels. Far from the station in Belgium where my good friend Tom once stepped in a human poo. A HUMAN POO. Told you the Belgians were animals.

Not taking into account the two hour jam we’d encountered,, the half hour detour for a supermarket, another half hour once we found a Lidl (mmm Lidl) and a few unscheduled stops for nappy changes, snacking and beveraging, we found ourselves not arriving at 2000 as we’d envisaged but rather by 2000 we were still hours away and it was threatening to get dark. Add to this the fact that we had decided to do a little scenic route driving away from the toll road – a grand idea in theory as we were kind of sick of staring at armco and overtaking trucks, in practice not so much as it was adding at least an hour onto our ETA – and suddenly we were experiencing a glorious sunset from the middle of open fields. This, whilst stunning, was a little unnerving seeing as we really only had the France atlas to go on and were fast running out of real directions. Once out of Bordeaux we had one road to go before reaching the Landes region in Aquitaine where we would have to navigate through hundreds of acres of forest to reach our villa. Bordeaux was where we finally lost the sunlight..and where we spotted the first flashes of the approaching storm.

Tania was driving, as per her instructions that I navigate the final chunk owing to our not having any goddamn directions. I was doing my best to estimate which way was South and what towns would appear in which order to ensure we were heading in the right direction. Suddenly the road signs inexplicably change from Bayonne, our current heading, to Paris…definitely NOT the direction we wanted.

“crap it CRAPIT”.

15 or 20 minutes later we find our way back to the south road and count our blessings that nothing can stop us now. Cue the lightning. Now I wasn’t entirely aware that my wife has issues with thunderstorms. The very presence of them unnerves her. The flashing simulates migraines, which she suffers from infrequently yet badly. So while I’m staring at the sky in utter joy as it lights up every few seconds my darling wife is gripping the wheel (leather bound, one up from the entry level model thank you) almost hard enough to leave John Candy sized indentations in. You can FURTHER add to this the sight of thousands of 50 ft tall trees silhouetting around us every time a flash goes off. We made it to the villa at just before midnight and i swear if we’d had a bottle of vodka she would have necked it BEFORE changing B and putting her to bed, which she almost never does.

Now all we have to do is try and relax before the journey back home. Hopefully not too difficult with all this bière. The problem is, as I mentioned before, the weather isn’t exactly Saharan. It’s fairly overcast today but it’s also fairly changeable – I’m just ecstatic that I’m not at my desk pounding on a Blackberry. Villa photos and more to come when I edit this from home – we’ve been Internet free for almost 5 days now; I hope apes haven’t taken over Britain yet – Lib-Con coalition excepted.

How many words can you write before the coffee finishes percolating? A good test..

Currently sheltering from the sun in the south of France making un petit dejuner while the baby is sleeping the morning’s activities off and the wife is wearing the skimpiest of skimpies by the pool. I shouldn’t really be writing this as I’m missing the first sun since yesterday afternoon; the sun-drenched south of France appears to be an illusion unfortunately.

Thunderstorms and drenched decking aside let me relate to you a little of the trip down here, weighing in at a hefty 19 hours door-to-door.

0400 – Margate: We began in the shittiest of shitty hotel rooms (£39 a night for the three of you Rich, what do you expect?) having awoken on what felt like a mattress constructed entirely of dogs. We’d brought a little canvas pop-up travel cot for B to sleep in but what we hadn’t thought about was the fact that she can now sit up unaided and crawl..and the cot is about 9 or 10 inches high. Peering throughout the murky blackness lit partially by the brighter-than-the-sun streetlights outside (the blinds were doing a sterling job but losing badly) I happened to see the cot go totally up on one side, come back down again and watch firstborn go shuffling off into the murk. If it hadn’t been midnight i probably would have laughed my tits off. Anyway, 0400 comes and with it, and the family car laden to the absolute hilt, a trip along the coast to Dover. Glorious Dover, with its majestic cliffs and holy shit a lot of articulated lorries. For once my little family was actually on time, nay EARLY for something, and we boarded the ferry with little drama. The Duty-Free shop, as you can imagine, crammed with smokers getting their Slightly Cheaper Fix, mmm classy. The cafeteria, home of the overpriced and overgreased. The open deck, blustery and full of people gleefully tearing open their newly purchased, Slightly Cheaper Fix. It was almost a delight to get back into the hold.

Driving though Northern France was a delight. Sticking to a nice, calm, comfortable speed we wound our way through Lille, Arras, Bapaume and Compiègne amidst golden fields all the while basking in the radiant glow of our air-con. Driving around Paris was a pig-fuck. Essentially a two-hour traffic jam, I had never encountered anything like it, not even the M25 at its worst as that didn’t have idiot Belgian drivers on it. Seriously, forget the Italians and the Greeks, the most terrifying drivers in Europe are the Belgians. They’ve no idea, they bimble from lane to lane regardless of how finely they cut you up. That’s why their number plates are bright fucking red.

Once firmly away from Paris our next task was to find a supermarket to stock up from. You know, essentials like 24 bottles of Bière Blonde for less than €4, giant bags of crisps with no discernible flavour, and more. The next big town on the road was Orléans, clearly the original New Orleans, CLEARLY facilitating our supermarché needs… So, so wrong. We ended up wandering around the city for a good half an hour following numerous E.Leclerc, Intermarche and Carrefour signage all claiming to be under 3 minutes away, all claiming to be the third turning on the right, before we gave in to the notion that nobody buys any food to eat in Orlèans they simply shuffle around groaning and looking for braaaaains. Frankly, having been so close to Le Mans and having my suggestion we go there to forage, I was overruled because for some reason Tania thought we’d only end up staring at some old racing track.

This was our halfway point, read on for part two next time where we encounter THE SLOWEST ROAD ON EARTH! EXTRAORDINARILY OVERPRICED TOLLS! and THUNDERBOLT & LIGHTNING (very very frightening).

There are two set responses that I receive regarding my iPad, and I’m sorry to all you equality buffs but it’s a gender difference. Women will usually tut and then ask “What do you need it for?”; Men on the other hand simply groan at hearing that question they’ve been hearing all their lives whenever they pass Dixons whilst trying hard to keep their hands in their pockets less they should fly out and act all grabby towards it.

It’s a reflection on the old adage ‘Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place’. I’m trying hard not to horribly generalise the male/female split here as it’s perfectly obvious that there are many geeked out females in the world that go into a similar gadget-frenzy as I or many of my male colleagues and friends do. Saying that, it’s also true that some of the guys I know have little or no interest in such technology. These are also usually the ones that think beige and doilies are interesting concepts but I digress. Suffice to say it’s blokes that I converse with regarding such marvels of our time whilst trying my best not to bore the arse off my wife whilst I give her a demonstration as to how I can change channels on our television with something other than the remote.

I’ve had my iPad now for a little over a month, courtesy of a good friend in New York, and sadly within that time whilst it has garnered much appreciation and drawn several longing glances on the rail network, the two biggest questions on people’s lips, male and female alike, are

“Is it any good / Do you like it?” & “Isn’t it just a big iPod?”

both of which make me want to hurl myself in front of the 2224 London Midland service to Birmingham New Street, calling at “of course it bloody well is” and “yes, I have progressive myopia”. Seriously people, do you actually expect me to say “well I’m just not sure why I spunked half a grand on a bit of tech but now that you mention it I might as well give it away because it’s dull as buggery”? Or perhaps “yes, you’re right, my iPod just wasn’t large enough for my tastes, I think I’ll buy something that costs five times as much and that I can’t actually fit in my fucking pocket”. Forgive my overuse of sarcasm but I really would hope that when faced with an object that you’ve probably never laid eyes on before but have heard near-mythic proportions of hype over you would want to strike up a conversation more interesting than “oooooHHHH!!”.

Yes I love my iPad; it’s like when you first held an iPhone and watched pictures rotate themselves as you turned it in your hands or things leaping up at you as you manipulated the touchscreen but (sigh, yes) on a much larger scale. The childish joy is still present – you could play with it for hours without really doing anything on it, just stare at your photo library that you already know so intimately but when presented on something unique becomes fresh and new to your eyes. Even something as mundane as the calendar application has been rethought enough so that you could spend a fair amount of time simply looking though your upcoming dentist appointments with a big grin on your face.

I might go into detail on one or two apps that have particularly piqued my interest next time, such as ComicZeal which lets me view my digital comic books in full electronic glory and Logmein Ignition with which I can remotely connect to servers at work (nerrrrrrrd).

I don’t actually own a computer these days – my wife and I have a netbook that we use as our home machine and I have my work Mac, so I guess I have one small excuse for buying this smartphone/laptop hybrid. When it comes down to it though, I do not need an iPad & neither do you. But that shouldn’t stop you from wanting one.

I figured that the awesomeness that is the iPad’s landscape mode keyboard should help me get back into blogging and seeing as I’m bloody paying for the server space this bitch runs on I also figured that I needed to get my money’s worth without whinging about it too much.

Fingers crossed there – I’m not saying I’ve got a reputation for moaning but if I’ve got a gripe about something you’re going to hear about it. My apologies to everyone that thinks I moan a lot. That’s pretty much all of you…

Anyway, the iPad. I’m writing this on the fairly minimalistic WordPress iPad application but to be honest when it comes to writing why the hell would you need bells and whistles from distracting you unless you’re a particularly shitty writer and you end up needing lots of colours and wacky fonts to make you look better, if not sound better? My point exactly. It’s just like people who say they can’t code websites without Dreamweaver. Frankly if you need that over-priced, over-bloated piece of shit software to write your website then you fucking belong in the 1990s. Most of us learnt the hard way; with Notepad. I haven’t done much coding in a while (as you can tell by what you’re reading this in…sorry, needs a bit of TLC but I’m way too busy right now, and if I try and change things I’m fairly sure I’ll fuck the site up even more) but when I did code it was using HTML-Kit or something similar that did a bit of colour coordinating as to what tags you had open and that was as advanced as it got. If I wanted to see a preview of the thing I’d upload it and view it on the Internet not in some poncey slide-out sidebar.

See what i mean about the ranting?

Blogging with this thing IS easier than firing up a laptop or (god forbid) using the awfully small keyboard on my iPhone (which has recently become VERY small) but at the same time I think the biggest problem recently has been allocating myself some time to write. I always knew that being a parent was going to take over and was going to be the primary focus of my life next to my wife and my job (and DEFINITELY in that order, love you T) but I didn’t realise quite how out of touch I would get with regards my friends, my family and my online presence. It’s not just the blog, my photography has taken a downward spiral recently and I think I’ve uploaded about 15 shots this year, IF that… These days it seems that if there’s a photo to be taken, the iPhone comes out and I’m happy to end up with a crappy resolution shot rather than a big old RAW. Bizarre.

But as of right now I intend to pull myself out of that funk and back into actually publishing some content online. Whether or not you read it. I’m not fussed actually, it’s more cathartic than narcissistic

I shall definitely do a review of my iPad on here as i was sort of intending to write about it this time around but I’ve gone off on one. Apologies. Less ranty next time, promise. Good to be back though

I’m a commuter but I don’t wear a suit, which instantly makes me look a bit weird in the mornings and kind of stared at (though that’s probably the beard too).  I don’t generally have an issue with other commuters: we all have a destination to get to and we all do it every single day so the amount of time spent staring at Tube maps and posted signs talking about delays, directions and cacked up escalators is kept to a minimum and we all go about our business on blissful early morning autopilot, moving eel-like around each other in a fashion not too dissimilar to a colony of ants.

That’s my early shift, not a problem.  Transpose that onto a shift that requires me to get onto the tube network at a time other than rush hour and things go apeshit.  Two words; FUCKING TOURISTS.  Now I understand that sometimes people need suitcases to cart all their luggage around – it’s inevitable if you’re travelling somewhere – but for fucks sake, how on earth do you manage to get in the damned WAY quite so much?  And it’s not just tourists – these frigging tiny cases that some Suits trail around behind them on their stupid telescopic handles; what the blue fuck can you fit in there besides your computer and your lunch?  Both these types of traveller combine to fuck me off totally by behaving completely inappropriately at the top and bottom of escalators.  What the SHIT are you people thinking?  “Ooooh here comes the bottom of the escalator, I actually have to start moving now and I’m (for some damned reason) blissfully unaware of the dozens of people crammed onto the moving platform behind me so I’m going to get to the bottom, wait til I’m off and then STOP DEAD AND PULL OUT MY CRAPPY CASE’S HANDLE AND MAKE YOU ALL FALL OVER ME.”

Goddamn.

I’ve actually started purposefully kicking these shitty draggy things when I see them and then staring at the owner until they apologise for running over my foot.  Quite refreshing.

It’s not so bad when they have the fucking nonce to stand on the right side of the escalator but then you get these  pricks that stand on the left and then scowl at you when you accidentally kick them in the back of the thigh when you squeeze past them.   I may progress soon to simply pushing them firmly in the back and watch them tumble all the way to the bottom.

I’m a considerate commuter too, which means when I’m about to change direction in the labyrinth of tunnels and corridors under the city I fucking look over my shoulder to make sure I’m not going to flatten anyone right behind me.  I’m not exactly small so I would probably do a reasonable amount of damage if I trod on your FACE.  Come to think of it, I probably only do this because I’m large – it’s the shorter tossers that decided to continuously cut me up, stop dead in front of me, admire a poster, knife a busker or anything else that makes me swear at them under my breath, or more frequently to their faces.  This applies just as hard to the dicks that get off a train and then stand there in front of the doors cause they’re totally clueless as to which direction to go in.  Fuck off to the far side of the platform!  Or onto the tracks, where you belong.

Then there’s the muppets who decide to wait until they’re right in front of the ticket gates before realising their ticket is buried somewhere in their wallet or pocket or handbag or firmly wedged RIGHT up their arse.  GTFO of the damned way – I have my ticket in my hand you penis, I want to get past you. No se? No fucking se? Why am I not surprised…

I could go on.  In fact, I will.

If you tread on me – APOLOGISE.  I wouldn’t smack you in the mouth whilst walking past you for no reason other than I wasn’t looking where I was putting my hand (disclaimer: I may smack you in the mouth.) so don’t just stamp your way past me on a platform or in a carriage without taking a little care.  Yes my feet are not small but neither are my fists.

Another wondrous new invention is this thing called personal hygiene.  When I get up in the morning I brush my teeth and I apply deodorant, something that 90% of you people decided is above you.  This one is especially applicable to the mouth-breathers in my carriage – I don’t really want to smell your coffee/nicotine/badger aroma emanating from your loose lipped face.  Either brush ‘em or stand elsewhere – preferably the Central Line.

Right, enough venting for now – I need to get on the DLR…