Sunday mornings for the last 6 months, have been the wife's only official day off. She has been working overtime for a lot longer than we needed, especially as I'm now back in full time work. Today is her last day working the extra shift and with it being clocks going forward day she's also going to lose an hour of much needed rest. Last Sunday morning at a little after 8:00am in the morning, Fishwife, his father-in-law (a builder) and the two rugrats, were booming at the top of their voices at Fishwife's conservatory. To add to this almost alien cacophony was the sound of hammer on concrete, a wheelbarrow and shovels being drawn across uneven wood decking. They might have well as just set up an illegal rave the amount of din being made.
The wife, who has been up by 6:00am every morning bar Sundays for ever, tends to have a late night on Saturday night, she's in bed by 11:00pm; so you could argue that she'd had at least 1 extra hour in bed by the time the work started, but I think that's small change. She huffed and puffed and generally sounded pissed off as she shut the window with a thump - which must have fallen on deaf ears next door because they resumed whatever they were dismantling with even more gusto. I decided to get up, let the ducks out and make myself a coffee - I was awake and I get more sleep than she does - relatively.
Wandering down the garden, Fishwife saw me and boomed a good morning at me; I waved a hand in the air and trudged off to the duck shed. I was pissed off because the wife was. I couldn't quite work out what was going on, but it seemed that part of his conservatory had started to fall apart - not bad considering it was put up about 6 weeks after ours and looks exactly the same except theirs is brown. As I was coming back up the garden, he peered over the fence and smiled. "I'm still in bed," I said to him and ignored whatever he was going to say. This was 8.18am.
By 8.25 they had finished whatever they were doing with a flourish of crashes bangs and wallops and then... nothing. The entire family hung around the house all day; the father-in-law, who you might have thought could only be there early was also there for most of the day and whatever they were doing could have been done at any part of the day. I just came to the conclusion that like many people on this planet, they don't actually give a fuck about anyone else.
The Forecast
Last year, he says with a cocky swagger, I did something that highly paid scientists can't do. I 90% accurately forecast what the weather between May and the end of the year would be like. I had a hiccup around October, because who knew it would be a month packed full of summery bits. But, I forecast correctly that summer would end around the end of June, we'd have two crap months before September came back and reminded us that summer was all but over.
With a temperature of 22 degrees forecast for parts of the country this weekend and it being March still, it made me wonder if I could do it again and if I could should I start my own forecasting service based entirely on whatever I feel the morning of whatever forecast I have to make. Probably not, but for a bit of fun lets see if I can anyhow.
Phil's forecast for April to the end of the year:
April: will be glorious, especially Easter and it will again lull people into a false sense of an impending BBQ summer. By the end of the month, North Sea cloud will prevent the east of the country from getting much above 10 degrees, but the rest of the country will be bright, sunny and above average temperatures.
May: another great month and one that has water companies scratching their heads - barely any rain, parched earth and low reservoir levels only add to the feeling that we're going to run out of water. The temperature hits 30 degrees towards the end of the month and the rest of Europe bakes under extremely unseasonal temperatures. Sales of ice cream booms and despite everyone being pissed off, it's too hot to protest.
June: the good weather continues and everyone with a summer event is looking at the calendar and thinking it's got to end some time. It does, during the 1st week of Wimbledon. The hot weather is replaced by cooler, showery weather and by the end of June it's like April should have been. Novac Djokovic wins the tennis tournament wearing a North Face fleece and wellies.
July: will be wet and unseasonably cold. Olympic athletes will be supplied with water wings.
August: will be like July but with less sunshine. The IOC suggests the GB won't get another Olympics as long as people have holes in their arses.
September: will roar in with balmy days and wall-to-wall sunshine and stay that way right up until
October: when it will remain mild until the middle of the month and then it will start to rain again and rain and rain. In fact it will rain until
November: where it will still rain and be cold as well. There are protests outside the Anglia Water Authority because there's still a hosepipe ban on. Chairmen of that company says, "With the amount of rain we've had why on Earth would any of you want to use your hosepipes? For God's sake, Wisbech is under water!" But apart from this, it's a quiet month, yet we won't see any early snow down here, we won't see any in
December: either, but it will be cool, foggy and dreary. Christmas Day will be 11 degrees and several global warning deniers will be executed. Statisticians will declare that the UK's weather is becoming more like India without the heat and our summer's are increasingly becoming monsoons, while the best time to take a holiday is in May.
Alternatives
Writing the above made me think of the things there seem to be too much of in the world and how if these things could be made into something how the economy might improve.
Take Bindweed for instance. You can have the stuff take over an entire garden if you leave a slither of the stuff in the ground. It grows about ten foot every hour and if it could be harvested and fed to poor people it would save a lot of money.
How about traffic cones? We see them everywhere, normally in places where roadworks aren't being done. Couldn't we melt them all down and er... throw them away? yes, it would spoil many a student's good night out, especially when he wakes up in the morning and finds it with a turd in it where one of his pissed friends has mistaken it for a toilet.
Dog and cat shit. Do you know there's an estimated 100 tonnes of the stuff squeezed out every bloody day of the year? That's more shit than money. If we started to use dog shit as currency, I'm betting people wouldn't worry so much about how little they have in their pockets!
Japanese knotweed. I've always struggled to see what the problem is and can never be arsed to find out, but if it's that bad, transplant it into the gardens of people who don't pay their rent.
TV Talent Shows. If we had the means of putting them all into a big grinder, mincing them up and then adding a quick-drying concrete solution, perhaps we could throw the results at Simon Cowell's head until he dies.
Children. I can think of many things to do with this particular infestation, however most of them are illegal at the moment, but give the coalition a few months and child labour will at least be repealed; I mean, these Tories need something to clean their chimneys and who better than a deprived and abused 6 year old?
Buttercups. I don't know about you, but I have masses of the blighters. If you can't make butter from them or fashion them into cups then like bindweed there must be some kind of nutritional value or perhaps a toxic element?
Tories done Good
Yes. I did write that and I mean it and I'm not being sarcastic. Honest. The new 40p minimum alcohol price is something that can only be a good thing, especially for pubs and clubs, because the hordes of pissheads out there will find it's as cheap to actually get drunk in a pub than do it at home and then go out and vomit over someone else's sofa.
The price of beer in my favourite pub is outrageous and it's a wonder how pubs can survive with pints of tax-relieved real ale weighing in at a staggering £3.50 a pint (My first ever pint cost me 28p), and with another duty increase thrown in just to piss off the poor people even more. But, preventing young and impressionable yoofs to avoid drinking the 21st Century equivalent of moonshine, ie white lightning styled cider (the stuff that's made about a mile from an orchard, which is its only connection to apples) can only be a good thing.
Hit and Miss
I have come to the conclusion that Family Guy is exactly like The Simpsons in that for every complete and utter genius episode, there's half a dozen stinkers. Fortunately they're only 22 minutes long (with credits), so it's not like a death sentence watching a bad one.
Talking to Roger on Thursday, we both agreed that it's almost not worth sticking with. Then, ironically, later that night, I watched two episodes that made me realise that some things are worth sticking with.
I've waxed lyrically about the episode where Peter Griffin gets a drugstore credit card, but in truth, it's an average episode with some pure moments of inspired genius, not least the vomiting competition, which, seriously, has to be seen to be believed; but on Thursday there were moments of surreal humour that almost achieved the pinnacle that the vomit scene did.
The first was the episode about Peter taking gene therapy and eventually becoming gay. It was inspired for being possibly the most offensive single episode I have ever seen, with literally no stone unturned. It begins with Peter buying a retarded horse and I had to watch the first 10 minutes again because it was just so funny.
The second episode, Long John Peter is basically stupid, but the subplot about Chris, his son, falling for a veterinary nurse is inspired. But the true star of this episode is a dead bull frog and the creators' ability to dwell on points far too long. The inspired line, because the majority of the gag is in silence is when Peter says to a despondent Chris, "I caught you a bull frog, drilled holes in its back so it could breathe and," opening the box, "oh..." Much of the entire episode is north of gross.
More Stuff
- This week I have been listening to mostly classical music, with a bit of Hybrid thrown in for good measure.
- I begin to read Chavs today.
- I need a haircut and the pond needs cleaning.
- I am strangely reticent about my football team's transformation into a crap team.
- I was subjected to a farting 13-year-old girl this week and it was really unpleasant.
- I gave £1 to Sport Relief.
- I have been saving the lives of frogs almost on a daily basis. The main pond has been like some surreal video game - Ducks vs Frogs - a bit like an X-rated Angry Birds. I still want to know how the one frog I fished out, as dead as a dodo, was missing its feet!
- The temperature is 19 degrees on the patio, I've done all my chores. I'm off to start on my tan, read the paper, have a coffee and enjoy the summer while it lasts!
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