Behold the tool wall. Imagine a expensive funnel directing building traffic to a defined end point. This best describes the journey from a useful outbuilding to extended house. And at the cusp of that funnel is a vertical representation of all things tool shaped. Not that I’m obsessed or anything but this is about as good as it gets.

For some reason, my picture links seem to be broken, rather than try and fix then, here’s a link

Once sufficient elbow room is allowed, there’s the capacity for a biblical event that’d make Noah consider the rising of the water as localised flooding. You have to think big when considering the consequences of a talentless Alex, armed with dangerous hardware and aimed at an unsuspecting bike. Really don’t consider this as a victim, what we’re really talking about is a blast radius.

Still it’s all indoors and unlikely to frighten the horses so I’ll file it somewhere between a hobby and a mental illness. Somewhat like this blog which has crested a hundred posts and , more worryingly, attracts five hundred hits a day. Surely you’ve got something better to do.

No, I haven’t in case you were going to ask.

It’d be great if it was wouldn’t it? Well yes, I’ve just burgled your house in broad daylight, sexually abused the dog and sold your children into slavery but hey what’s that DONKEY going to do about it?”

But even allowing for nonsensical animal metaphors, it really is. I may, in a moment of unconsidered candour, admitted to being red-green colour blind when it comes to those bastions of the highway code; the humble traffic light. In a volte-face even more brazen than Sven’s tactical mastery of his forward line, I made a silent pledge to respect the red this morning. I was the only one. Entire legions of cyclists from Tour de France Wannabe’s to Halfords specials breezily ran the lights much to the consternation of crossing pedestrians and crosser motorists.

While I was trailing notionally in this rolling roadblock, my place astride the moral high ground was uncontested. Oh the glorious hypocrisy of my strident pleas for us pedal pushers to respect the highway code. Growling asshole” at every RLJ’r, I felt a faint surge of pride at my restraint “ either than or it was a somewhat unplanned bowel movement. And as only non light running colleague muttered it’s not like I want to get to work any earlier”. Good point, well made.

So as I wafted into the changing room borne aloft on a lingering sense of worthiness, the mobile crime scene that is riding in London slammed the door behind me. Someone had stolen my deodorant. Yep, nicked, filched, ˜arf inched “ however you want to categorise it, a fellow commuting bloke (unless it was a very self confident women desperately in need of a quick blast of Lynx) has had it away on the hoof.

While I’ve become immune to the threat of damp towels, the occasional ˜borrowed’ shower gel and fair weather squatters stealing my space, this is way beyond the acceptable direction of travel. I wouldn’t have missed a couple of cheeky squirts in the spirit of shared smelliness but the entire bloody tin?

So I’ll be filling my ˜hot spare’ with pepper spray and installing a couple of trip wires and web cans to catch the bounder on camera. Failing that, pass me the donkey.

After a late afternoon premeditated outage, all systems are back on line and the barn is finally operational. This smooth transition was carefully planned through a number of complex spreadsheets, and the configuration of the electronic multitude documented to a level of precision, one could proudly call military.

A slight logistical oversight caused the plan to be somewhat rationalised to something along the lines of turn it all off, lump it up the garden, mutter a small prayer, turn it all back on agai”?. You see only once I was awash in a sea of disconnected cables did I realise that all the planning stuff was stored, unprinted, on the PC. That’s the same computer now lying dormant with it’s life-giving umbilicals savagely ripped out. Oops.

Never mind, there’s only nine plugs, seven USB connections, a rather complex music system and various connections I’ve never really understood but do in some way seem integral to a happy and humming system. There’s a certain satisfaction when an errant connection finally clicks home confirming that your installation approach of stabbing it blindly in the general direction of an appropriate sized hole is, in fact, pretty damn efficient. Worked for me before in, er, other situations so it seemed appropriate to try it here. And at no point did the PC sigh for God’s sake, if this is your idea of foreplay, I’ll turn the TV back on“.

Too much information again? Sorry.

Here are a few pictures to take your mind off that disturbing mental image.

The line above shows before and after taken from about the same place separated by about 9 weeks.

This line are a few random more. I’m really happy about the alarm system. It is truly idiot proof – trust me I’ve tested it.

It wasn’t all beer and skittles. Until some bright spark develops wireless everything including power, there’s a rats nest of cables spoiling the clean lines of the wall. I examined my bothered pocket but there was nowt in there, so in the executive style of BARN CEO, I reckoned it was good enough.

The sofa however was quite another matter. When we moved house, the removal guys whistled long and hard over cups of tea and roll ups when we diffidently asked if it was possible to get it upstairs. Not without taking the windows out apparently. It is rather a large item but through sheer bloody mindedness we shoehorned it into a spare bedroom and vowed never to move it again. Except in firewood sized pieces. The cost of the redecorating of almost every wall in the house is still a painful memory and this was nearly three years ago.

So reversing the process was a tad wearisome. At one point, my insanely frustrating and sweating form could be found kicking the offending object while offering the following advice You get stuck one more fucking time and I’m fetching the fire axe” I” KICK am” RAM WITH ELBOW not” SHOULDER CHARGE Fucking” HEADBUT Joking” COLLAPSE IN WEEPING DESPAIR.

All this achieved was creating a rather stylish if totally useless chimney in what was previously pristine paintwork. After a couple of days effort and the real possibility of a Rooney like Metatarsal injury, we cracked the code by improvising in the fifth dimension and applying time lapse string theory. It’s behind me as I write this and it’s bloody grinning. FIREAXE” yeah that’s showed it who’s boss.

Needless to say the entire house needs redecorating yet again including replacing an inoffensive five foot floorboard that got in the way”. I was not a man to be trifled with at this point let me tell you. It would have been cheaper to buy a new sofa but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that if there is a stupidly expensive way to do a job, I’ll intuitively come to that solution. I’m thinking of it as a gift.

There’s still much to do on the workshop side including the ceremonial hanging of the tool wall. However, when the builder finally returns from the cup of tea he popped out for a few days ago, his first priority will be the office floor. After three coats of woodstain so thick we had to chisel it out, it still has the shielding properties of gravy. I’m all for a bit of natural weathering but already it has the appearance of hosting a 24 hour roller skating contest for fat people.

Having whinged on for about 700 words, it is worth saying it is a bloody ace place to work. Once the beer fridge is re-installed, all shall be well with the world.

Until I break the next thing. Stay tuned, it won’t be long.

…. Oh I wish that were true.

The finish on the barn door superbly captured by the phrase special needs chimp chucking bucketfuls of turd finished by soily trowel” has been returned to virgin wood. A new door would have cost about fifty quid and rewarded such a purchase by providing me with an excuse to burn the old one in a Joan Of Arc Stylee (Recant, Recant your distressed oak finish! No? Right then pass the blowtorch). Instead I spent a sweaty hour doing almost none of it before the sander exploded, then the builder’s mate sandblasted the entire barn with sawdust uses ever increasingly viscious power tools.

I believe this cost me about a thousand pounds but have been too afraid to ask. Will I learn my lesson and not attempt difficult projects such as door painting again? I wish it were so but looking at the violently projectile vomit colour of the floor, I feel the answer may be no. A tip for all those would be DIY’s out there, don’t allow your five year old daughter be the major decision maker in any colour choices. Especially if she’s already owned up to wanting a green, pink and blue striped bedroom.

Still on the upside, the tool wall has arrived. After extensive research that could have been better spent doing almost anything else, I arrived “ via a couple of truly terrifying DIY forums “ at the Park Tool Wall (hobby version “ apparently you can’t hang chainsaws off this one which is fine as I’ll never be allowed one. We love the kids too much). It’s augmented with a couple of rather fetching blue storage cabinets that apparently will simplify your life and provide you with many years of service and enjoyment”

Cynically I feel it may take more than a couple of plastic bins made in a Chinese sweat shop to achieve this harmonic life balance.

The barn is so close to being done, I’m moving in if only to cover surfaces I may feel the irrational urge to decorate.

There may be pictures later this week. If you can just hold your excitement back, that’d be appreciated 😉

From the Times today.

Well that’s university funds well spent. Did they go visit these turretless tank driver’s co-workers and friends to discover if they were arrogant wankers as well? Actually they needn’t bother; I’d wager they are based on no research nor statistical corroboration other than bouncing off these pointless symbols of supposed status and actual twatiness.

Jeez, that must be most pointless piece of research since men would rather watch football and drunk beer than discuss shoes?. It’s put me in mind of the IG’s.

Madness.

So proclaimed Random, my five year old daughter on ditching here stabilisers for good. Her rationale for such a bold hypothesis was grounded in the immutable fact that I fall off more. Fair enough.

One of the few rules of ‘stuffing the hedgehog’ (other than the aggressive use of rambling metaphors) was that at no point would it turn into ‘what I did on my holidays’. Obviously I didn’t plan for it to turn into ‘what I did on my way to work’ but that’s by the by. It’s only one step up from sending pictures of your kids in Christmas cards, accompanied by a self congratulatory note concerning firstborn’s prowess at piano and the state of the rhododendrons.

Wrong, on so many levels. This isn’t me being a blob snob, it’s just, well, wrong.

But for once, and only once, I’ll make an honourable exception excused by playing the proud father card.

Easy when you know how

Pink, it’s the new black

Continue reading “I’m better than you, Dad” →

Old photos are truly emotive. They fire off memories of times, friends and places long forgotten. Cruelly exposing what the intervening years have done to body shapes, hairlines and innocent smiles.

Between about 1988 and 1995, I amassed fifteen bumper albums chronicalling my life through a haphazard sequence of holidays. Winter skiing holidays sprang up like hardy perennials interspersed with a monster month’s road trip across the US, almost as long in Australia, six weeks bumming around Europe on an Inter-Rail card, and old girlfriends smiling guilelessly at the lens.

They’ve travelled with me through five jobs, three house moves, one marriage and two kids. I was determined to pick out a few for the kids to laugh at and dump the rest. The few turned to a few hundred although I’m kidding myself that at least half that number are held back specifically to embarrass old friends.

God I look young. Well I was young, but serious life stuff has tamped down those happy memories until tonight. Whoever said ˜Youth is wasted on the young’ clearly knew his onions, but while bittersweet emotions characterise the shock of a time lapsed you, at least my twenties were spent doing interesting things with funny people and (amazingly considering my attempts at a moustache) pretty girls. Maybe I was paying them, I don’t remember.

Selection criteria were based on what made me laugh, smile, remember or “ as happened more often that I liked “ wistfully nod. My unlined fizog is permanently hamming it up and grinning at the camera. Nowadays the lens is lucky to get a cynical grimace and only then if I don’t see it coming.

The prints are to be posted off and converted into computer food while the originals will be kept in case the vast importance of regular backup passes me by one day. As for the albums I’ve raped and pillaged which contain about two thousand unwanted images, they’re going in the bin. No point in keeping them, they remained undisturbed for over ten years and storing the albums will resign them to the same fate.

So, like I say, they’re going to the skip. Only not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week at the latest. Maybe I’ll just have one more look through. But I’m not keeping them, because that’d just be clinging onto fractured memories glued together by narcissm and a the rather unmanly notion of pointless romanticism.

I’ll post a few up when I get them back from the man with the scan. If only because it’s cheaper than therapy and everyone deserves a laugh. My wife is strangely unmoved by a life which she never saw although the themes of drinking, gurning and messing about with dangerous powertools appear to have passed seamlessly into this phase of my life as well.

Pouring Rain. Drinking with our suppliers. Availability of a hotel room. Groundhog day.

The last time this happened, I narrowly avoided career suicide through the inebriated yet inspired use of a lamppost. Lesson learned, I ducked outside the pub at 10 PM (appropriate verbage when considering the monsoon conditions) before alcohol robbed me of unaided vertical transport. This ensured a lucid conversation with the taxi driver who wasn’t required to carry me to reception. I felt strangely proud checking in without having three attempts to sign my name, and further sobriety was assured once I’d spied the room rate.

Having handed over half the firm’s equity for a room, I was staggered to find that breakfast wasn’t included. Not having the authority to mortgage one of the firm’s buildings, I declined their generous offer of twenty quid for a stale croissant come morning.

Continue reading “London. Odd place isn’t it?” →

And that’s just inside the changing rooms. After an impassioned campaign to reduce the people to shower ratio below 50:1, the facilities team came up trumps. Obviously very slow growing and quite reluctant trumps, but trumps all the same. Not only have they replaced the door handle so there is no longer the dreadful possibility of being trapped in a small room with a plethora of smelly blokes, but also two out of the three showers work. Simultaneously and with hot water. That’s hot water, not water piped directly from under the artic ice flow or water superheated to a million degrees through nuclear fission “ no, finally after months of valiant spannerwork from our finest engineers, we have the ability to banish smellyness and get to work on time.

Hence the sunshine. Broad smiles all round and the almost forgotten experience of arriving and leaving the shower room in the same hour. Obviously there has to be a hitch and despite the best efforts of the engineering crème de la crème, one cannot quite say it’s a perfect solution. Because you can’t turn the shower off. Arriving raffishly late this morning, I was struck by the resemblance to the Hot Box punishment cells in Bridge Over The River Kwai. I struck out in my best Alec Guinness pose attempting to discern whether the heat and steam symptomised a major fire. I was reassured by shadowy figures emerging coughing from the mist cheerfully extolling the joy of multiple showers. Completely in character now I challenged them with a husky You should not have come back Obi-Wan” before realising that was the wrong Alec Guinness movie and re-sheathing my light sabre.

Yes that’s meant to be rude. No, I never promised it would be funny.

Wet outside, Wet inside, Cold outside, Steamy inside, Windy outside, Kind of windy inside. I blame the porridge, honestly any closer to water and it’d be reclassified as lettuce. And it’s well known vegetables give you wind. Well known to me anyway.