Heroic Failure

L heads over to Leamington today to see her ‘baby boy’ on the occasion of his 21st birthday. She has to change trains in Derby, so I leave the car at work so that she can get off there on the way back, pick up the car and then, in her words, ‘rescue me from myself’. I’m running home. At least it'll save me upsetting some poor bus driver who doesn’t want some sweaty bloke on his bus.

The long drawn out Olympic ticket saga continues afresh today as road cycling tickets go on sale. Twice I request a ticket for the Time Trial Finish and twice, after ten minutes or so, the search comes back telling me its reserved tickets for me. Each time I select my credit card, type in the security code, tick the T&C box and pressed 'proceed' only to get told ‘ha ha fooled you, we haven’t really reserved any tickets for you’.

By the third search they'd all gone, of course. So I’m not very happy at all but this is what the Olympic spirit is all about, great success (rare ones) and heroic failure.

Apparently Mrs Bradley Wiggins had the same problems as me, so I’m in good company. Whilst a spokeswoman for the London 2012 organising committee brushed off yet another ticket debacle as ‘sheer volume of demand’ that caused people with tickets reserved to be returned to the back of a 20 minute queue, only to find that once they again reached the front the cupboard was bare.

At least it’s not quite so hot today when I start running but still I leave off the lycra that I usually wear under my shorts. Big mistake. I now have sore thighs where they rubbed together.

I had jokingly suggested to L that she checks the gutters as she drives along. Then I see her driving quite slowly past me in Borrowash, probably doing just that. Although if she really did want to ‘rescue me from myself’ she shouldn’t have stopped then and not at our prearranged meeting point four miles down the road.

We have arranged to meet in Wetherspoons car park in Stapleford, which sounds quite covert, or if they haven’t got a car park, in one of the dodgy side streets. Although she actually parks at Lidl, which is perhaps the same thing.

She’s had quite a day in Leamington. Son has not only confessed that he needs some smart clothes, and should trust a mother’s judgement in these matters but has said he wants to join a gym and get fit. Whatever is the world coming to?

(Tuesday 29th May)

Kick Off... Throw Off... Bully Off...

I saw this on the ever unreliable BBC. Beijing has set a rule that public toilets should contain no more than two flies at a time. It is not clear how the flies will be punished if more than two of them enter at the same time.

I tell L to start brushing up on her handball. In this morning’s latest Olympic ticket scramble I add another ticket to our Olympic portfolio and book the entertainment for the Saturday evening when we’re down there for the Pentathlon. Not just any old handball but the bronze medal match no less. I could have got the gold medal match but as Team GB won’t be in either, I thought I’d go for the early evening game so we get to spend our one night in London out on the tiles. This game is a 5pm kick off... throw off... bully off... whatever it is. Must google. At least we’re in the Olympic park this time.

There actually now appears to be plenty of tickets, just not for the highest profile sports. Which makes you think the initial hysteria created by the original ballot system was manufactured and as it turns out totally unnecessary. They could have just balloted half a dozen sports.

I don't know if they intend to reopen their resale system or not but I'm guessing a lot of people will have tickets from that original ballot that they've now improved up on and hence will be leaving an empty seat somewhere if they can't get rid.

My receipt says I’ve been charged £6 for ‘fulfilment’. Wonder if that means they’re chucking in beer and a massage.

I spend the evening out in Derby bragging about my handball tickets to a couple of friends over a few beers. Naturally they think their badminton and volleyball tickets are superior. They may have a point of course, my knowledge of handball is a little sparse, as the moment.

(Wednesday 23rd May)

Spinning The Roulette Wheel

So Olympic tickets... here we go again. Let’s spin the roulette wheel.

First up an all events Modern Pentathlon ticket and in less than three minutes Ticketmaster told me I was having a laugh. So no change there then. I spin the wheel again.

I take a punt on the Brownlee boys and the Triathlon. Ticketmaster fell off its chair at this point, ROFL-ing for all it was worth, but only after making me wait 7... no 8... no 9... no 10 minutes... no 11... it just kept going up and up like something you bought from Microsoft. I remove my fist from my PC screen and spin the roulette wheel again.

I go for the lesser Modern Pentathlon option, a ticket for just the Greenwich Park events - the riding, running and shooting. Ticketmaster said 'yeah no problem'. Now it really was taking the piss.

I kept looking at the screen which was now saying ‘you have 1 minute 10 seconds to accept these tickets’... no ‘1 minute 5 seconds’ ... ‘1 minute’... hang on just one minute... I mean 50 seconds... I mean 45 seconds... this countdown is going down not up, that can’t be right. It’s also not long enough to decide whether I’m being defrauded or not.

Sod it. Buy buy buy. It’s only money and it’s the London Olympics. We all love the London Olympics.

So yes we have tickets. I still can’t get anywhere near the Olympic Park but it’s a start.

Buoyed by this success, I wonder what the hotel prices are like. The media have led us to believe that the only way to stay in London during the games is to pay someone a grand or so to sleep in their garage on the edge of the M25 and then walk in to London because all the public transport will have ground to a halt.

So I’m rather surprised to pay £85 for a double room with an ensuite bathroom and full English breakfast just over a mile from Greenwich Park. As I say, we all love the London Olympics. I really don’t know what everyone is complaining about.

Talking of London, L is there today for work. Good choice Dear, there’s a train strike on but then again isn’t there always. Does anyone know what they’re striking for? Thought not. They’re probably all sat in front of their PC trying to get Olympic tickets. Ha. Tough. I’ve got them.

Anyway, she has to get a taxi from Nottingham to Long Eaton, then get a train to Tamworth and then to London... coming back is via Tamworth, Derby and then by bus to Nottingham. Which is sort of annoying, sort of hilarious and just makes you really really hope that they don’t get given whatever they're demanding.

I take the boys to squash, well they wait in the car and then I wave to them as I go to the pub for a pint of ‘Traditional’. That’s what it was called and that’s what it was. Very nice, none of this ‘blonde’ stuff. Then I make it up to the boys by chucking balls on Embankment.

After her traumatic day, L texts to say she’s just got off the bus and will meet me in bed with a bottle of wine. Ok boys, that’s it, game's over.

(Thursday 17th May)

Powder Dry, Bone Dry

L reckons that we should both be getting up and getting fit rather than getting amorous in bed. I disagree, plenty of muscles group that can be worked on here and all at seven calories per minute (so they say). Then because I’m on the bike today, I have to get a real shift on to get to work on time because I’m running late which does my legs loads of good, I hope.

As I’m on the bike, dodging potholes, I best mention the recent University of Nottingham study which reckons they can improve average life of a pothole repair from four years to fifteen. Hang on a sec. Four years! Who are they kidding. Four months more like. The ones I cycle over are re-repaired every year and even that isn’t often enough.

I have another look at the Olympic tickets website. There seems to be availability for a lot of things at the moment, apart from athletics and cycling of course. One wonders why all these tickets weren’t on sale in the first place... plus they’re limiting people to one set of tickets each now, which would have been a good idea in the first place. I’m keeping my powder dry (it's bone dry) for an assault on the modern pentathlon and the triathlon, which are added tomorrow. I just hope that everyone else isn’t planning the same.

After work, I pedal to the pool for a swim. L says she's rather jealous but she wouldn't be if she saw the queue, which is out of the door. It's an almost exclusively female queue so I assume they're all going to be booking into bodypump, zumba, pilates, chairobics or whatever the current fashion is but no, they all pass through saying ‘swim please’. So OMG it's going to be busy. If it had been all been men I'd have been running in the opposite direction because it would have been competitive hell at the top end of the pool. I know it's going to be busy but at least it’ll be scenic.

Actually it’s hell. Twenty-eight swimmers across five lanes, the sixth lane is shut for a lesson and there are eight in the fun pool. These morning swimmer like L get it so easy. I make it a quick one.

(Wednesday 16th May)

A Very Big Sofa

Apparently LOCOG or whatever they call themselves have found some spare tickets down the back of the Olympic sofa. About 900,000 of them. It’s a very big sofa. So this morning I make use of my exclusive ‘presale’ window. How this be a presale when it’s after the original ballot and after the secondary sales window earlier this year... I have no idea but never mind.

It is with a heavy heart, e.g. huge expectations of failure (again), that I log on to my exclusive window, just me and approximately one million others.

I’m after track cycling, which everybody is after of course, just because they once saw Sir Chris or Vicky P in Lyrca and thought I’ll have ticket for some of that, so naturally I am correct in assuming it will be another unsuccessful attempt.

It’s also another battle with the unfathomable Ticketmaster. I promise I’ll never ever slag off SeeTickets again. I avoid Ticketmaster like the plague for gig tickets for the same reason that it’s a disaster for Olympics tickets. First there’s their obsession with ‘captcha’ and it always takes me three attempts to solve the puzzle, which in Olympic ticket buying terms is valuable seconds lost.

Then there’s their annoying way of being incapable of updating availability in real time, sometimes you suspect with Ticketmaster even in the same week is beyond them. So you pick your event, your price range and how many you want and press the button marked ‘beg’. It tells you to go for a long slow walk around the block while it consults the tea leaves in the bottom of the Ticketmaster mug before coming and saying ‘nope, not go any of those’. It doesn’t say ‘we haven’t got 4 but you can have 2’, or ‘we haven’t got any at £20 but we have some at £40’. It doesn’t even say ‘we haven’t got any tickets at all for that event you moron, what are you even trying for?’

Well I’m trying because your website says you have availability in ALL price categories, so I sort of assumed you had availability in all price categories. No? Well perhaps you did last Friday but clearly you haven’t bothered to update it since. So I change my criteria and try again, in an attempt to unlock the perfect combination that might yield me a back row restricted view seat in the velodrome behind a bunch of Moldovans who probably got theirs for nothing because no one’s heard of the Olympics in Moldova.

Each time you have to manually empty your shopping basket because it won’t let you put a second set in there until you take out the ones they haven’t got. You’d think it would do this for you. More valuable seconds lost.

Eventually with Ticketmaster still showing full availability in all categories I give and go check the comments on the BBC website to try to find someone who’s more miserable than me. Only to come up against some smartarse saying how easy it all was. Crowing about how they bagged front rows seats and a night out with Jess Varnish, all in under 30 seconds and still had change from ten grand. We all love the London Olympics.

Plan FF is Thursday and a punt on either Triathlon or Modern Pentathlon tickets. Don’t hold your breath.

I wonder if that Nottingham lad who was trying to give away the £1,000 romantic holiday for two to Malta after his girlfriend dumped him thought about swapping it for Olympic tickets. Perhaps he’s already got Olympic tickets. Perhaps when they split she got the Olympic tickets and he got Malta. No wonder he doesn’t fancy going any more.

The afternoon’s entertainment is Daughter dashing (well sort of) around Sheffield, trying to find a Co-Op bank, trying to extract enough money from them to pay her rent and then taking it to her landlords office by 5pm, having not started until about 2.30. All the time I’m assisting her by text. It reminds me mightily of Treasure Hunt with Anneka Rice back in 80’s for some reason, only without the helicopter.

I was beginning to wonder if she’d get there before 5pm but she did, with time to spare in the end. So at least that challenge went to plan.

No dog class, I take the boys on the park instead.

(Monday 14th May)

A Punishing Schedule

L reckons she’s just done her last ever paper round covering for Daughter. That’s a shame. I've always enjoyed the personalised service even if she never did don the
short shirt and white ankle socks like they did when I was a lad.

L’s sister has Olympic tickets. Bravo. She’s the only person out of around twenty that I know who got any. At least I can brag that I know someone who got a ticket even if I can’t go myself. She’s become a minor celebrity.

According to the TV some people got three lots or more. That shouldn’t be allowed. Of course I could have got up at 6am to try and got a foot in the door for the one remaining reasonably priced athletics session but everybody will be doing the same thing and the website will grind to a halt. So I didn’t. By the time I did check at 8.30 everything bar football, weightlifting, volleyball and wrestling had gone. All sold by 6.45 apparently.

Daughter floats out of her last exam, the one she was least looking forward to. It seems to have gone well. I hope she quoted Chomski, Skinner, Piaget et all. I would have done.

My dodgy calf is improving all the same but still I opt out of tonight’s race. A good call, as it rains again, just like last year. It’s the start of a busy week for L. Four runs and a Glee concert in the next eight days. Now that’s a punishing schedule for anyone, particularly the Glee concert.

The race, the Heanor 5 miler, is at Shipley Cricket Club and looks to be quite challenging e.g. hilly. I might have liked those hills but never mind, I spectate instead. There’s quite a crowd watching, a noisy crowd too or was that just Doggo and MD. Doggo is always noisy at races because he feels he should be joining in but MD has never been that bothered until recently. Now he’s becoming a right pain, perhaps ever since I did that one race with him. It’s not warm to spectate either, I’m glad they’ve got coffee laid on.



The goody bag is good, which comes my way. A drinks bottle, I always need new drinks bottles, and a selection pack of High 5. Useful to me.

We get home at around nine and head into town, via the chip shop, which is perhaps a mistake. It wasn’t brilliant. We head into town on the off chance that Daughter decides to join us for a midnight drink, when she becomes 18, because I guess one of our local pubs where she’s been going since she was five wouldn’t be quite what she had in mind. In the end though she doesn’t, so we have a pleasant drink on our own.

(Friday 24th June)

A Fight To The Death In The Street

I did L’s trick this morning and get on the wrong bus. A brand new red Trent bus with Derby on the front turned up, so three of us got on it, assuming it was the Red Arrow. It wasn’t. So I took the scenic route to work.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists have announced that people over the age of 65 should drink a maximum of only 1.5 units of alcohol a day, just 11 units per week. That’s because older people are less able to process alcohol and the drink might also interact with medication they may be taking.

They are seriously missing the point here. Having reached the age of 65, those folk have clearly worked out what is good for them. Meanwhile the rest of us are desperately trying all they can to get to that magic number, or whatever the magic age is to by then, partly to piss the government off and claim a pension. Once there surely all bets are off and we can all drink ourselves into oblivion.

L runs home, via the canal, so that she has the option to drown herself on the way. Ah, hard day at work Dear? She should save her drowning for a glass of 1.5 later.

I may have a few more than 1.5 tonight but I’ll put a brave face on it. I meet up with a couple of old school friends, have a few beers, compare our lack of Olympic tickets and then we head off to find something to eat.

As we walk down the row of curry houses on Midland Road in Derby, both the Viceroy and the Shalimar try and prostitute us through their doors with tempting ‘offers’. We fell for this at the Viceroy before but the offers disappeared once they’d got us through the door. Although we did get a free drink when we complained about the slow service.

For a moment we consider getting the two to face off against each other, in a kind of a fight to the death for our trade in the street but we’d still need to get the winning offer in writing. Perhaps in blood.

But we don’t, we skip past them both and go Nepalese, sort of. The Mount Everest Gurkha Restaurant is just around the corner on London Road, I didn’t even know it was there. It’s Nepalese and Indian but judging by the menu, more Indian than Nepalese. That apart the food is very good and the place busy, which is always a good sign.

They even have a Nepalese beer called Gurkha. It looks interesting, tastes ok but turns out to be from... Horsham. Oh well you can’t have everything.



(Wednesday 22nd June)

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)