Another Year Closer To The Bus Pass

It’s my birthday today. So another year older and another year closer to the bus pass. As Daughter points on her birthday card, which is addressed to the ‘old git (and not the furry one)’. She also emails me birthday greetings but attaches a picture of a bottle of raspberry vodka which is a unsubtle reminder of what I forgot to get her yesterday. A reward (of sorts) for finally getting her university choice decided.

I cycle in to work today. It’s a pleasant morning, if a little chilly and there's not much traffic trying to kill me or perhaps they were just being kind on my birthday.

Applications for Olympic Tickets have closed. The organisers reckon they’ve received requests for more than 20 million tickets from 1.8 million people. That’s three times as many tickets as they have but was pretty much expected. Despite organisers ‘quietly’ urging people to only bid for what they could afford, they must be ‘quietly’ thrilled. The whole system had been developed to encourage people to opt for as many tickets as possible. Although it’s not the first time tickets have been sold for an Olympics via a lottery system, this is the first time buyers haven’t been told which events they've been allocated before having to pay for the tickets. This means people can’t back out and will therefore have to either attend or sell the tickets on. So no empty seats, in theory.

So everybody, me included, has gone for multiple events to avoid getting nothing. Although with my luck in lotteries and raffles, I’ll probably win nothing.

L takes the afternoon off and takes Son and all his stuff back to university. She not only survives the drive to Warwick but when I get home and she offers me a drink, it’s of coffee rather than wine. So it must have gone well.

I guess I really should have gone to the pool after work, I had the time but it is my birthday so I didn’t want to spoil it by swimming. You don’t want to drown on your birthday do you?

It's off to the park instead then, where two cats strolled nonchalantly across our path arm in arm or whatever the feline equivalent is. Bold as brass they were. Well until MD saw them that is, at which point they turned into Usain Bolt and Tyson Gay respectively. One flew over a garden fence but the other bizarrely decided against that escape route. Instead it doubled back, which when he saw the cat heading back towards him totally freaked MD out. Then before he could recover from the shock, it sold him a dummy and then with a quick shimmy disappeared through a gap in the hedge.

Inexplicably for a birthday, not a single drop of alcohol passes my lips. I’m saving myself for the weekend, which starts on a Thursday for the second week running.

(Wednesday 27th April)