Doing Nothing For Seven And A Half Hours

Today I’m back in London for a meeting and I meet my boss at 7am at Junction 25 of the M1. After slipping out of the house so early and leaving L asleep in bed, I later get reprimanded for neglecting my duties as an alarm clock.

Travelling to and from London is the usual traffic hell. In fact it’s probably worse. It takes us three and half hours to get down there and four hours to get back.

Then there’s the fact that no one from the actual company we’re visiting turns up for their own meeting, preferring to leave their three contractors to it, makes it all a very bizarre day.

When I finally get back home, L is out running around Forest Rec with Daughter doing a parkrun training run. Sounds like there's some serious training going on there.

I decide to skip a third night in a row dog training and go to pick L up instead. I’m actually feeling a bit shattered after all this travel (a.k.a. sitting around doing nothing for seven and a half hours), so I could have done with some sleep tonight but Doggo has other ideas with one of his choking fits.

(Wednesday 12^th July)

An Interesting Development

The dog alarm oversleeps a touch and L refuses to be nudged awake in a timely fashion, so it ends up having to be a really fast bike into work this morning but I was nicely hyped up for it, so can’t complain.

L is totally re-thinking her fitness because of her ankle, which isn’t improving. She’s even considering giving up walking, which is an interesting development as I know she doesn’t mean driving everywhere. There’s always the unspoken 'B' word. 

I buy tickets for the opening night of World Athletics Championship next year in the Olympic Stadium. Any excuse for a wild weekend in The Smoke. It includes the Men’s 10k final which may or may not have Mo Farah in it as he could have moved up to marathons by then. I prefer the long stuff rather than the short and fast stuff. Although we get that as well, as the Men’s 100m qualifying is on the same session.

The ride home is a tad damp. No squash tonight. 

(Thursday 19^th May)

Raise The Alarm

L announces she is going to move the alarm clock ten minutes earlier. I’m not totally sure what the plan is for these extra ten minutes and we do already put our existing alarm call to good use but I’m happy to go with the flow.

My lady of leisure pops into work for an hour, then heads off for a haircut before working from home for the rest of the day and chucking balls, of course. Ball chucking has actually entered a new realm since most of the trees went. You can chuck the ball an impressively long way now. MD seems up to the challenge though.  

The new hairdo turns out to be a bit on the short side, even for L. I can see I’ll be doing my Christmas shopping at the clip-on ponytail shop this year. She says you don't look at the mantelpiece while you're stoking the fire or so the saying goes. I have a saying too, never underestimate the effect of a good quality mantelpiece.

As I’m out again tonight, continuing to celebrate Cask Ale Week, this time with the ex-University guys in Bingham, L is treating herself (and the dogs) to a roast chicken. Naturally a Sunday roast on a Friday night is a no no but I do pinch some and dunk it in the leftover Madras sauce from our takeaway on Sunday. It’s an excellent improvised meal to fortify myself before the night ahead.

(Friday 2^nd October)

Bring On The Cold Shower

Rather than an alarm clock L suggests a Flashdance type cold shower would be more effective in getting her up in the mornings, out with the boys and to the gym....



Hmmm. I quite like the sound of that. It was pretty sexy in the film. Tomorrow perhaps something can be arranged?

It is in fact another of those days when you wish you’d stayed in bed. Blimey it was icy. I thought of L doing the dog walking as I slithered to the bus. Though some brace soul at our place cycled into work.

The council send a Pest Control officer to look at our mice problem and look is all he does. He informs us that modern poisons don’t work unless taken repeatedly. Bizarre. Is this a health and safety thing in case you inadvertently feed them to a small child for lunch? But he advises against poison anyway because, should it work, then dead mice would need to be retrieved from their final resting places, wherever that may be, before they start to decompose... He also informs us that they do not supply traps either... so what does he do for £50 an hour? No idea. He drives off in his van and our MD follows him out of the car park on his way to Wilco to buy some mouse traps.

Governments are always on about citizens doing their bit to stop the spread of crime and then they turn around and prosecute someone for doing just that...

Michael Thompson, 64, from Grimsby has been fined £175 and ordered to pay £250 costs after being found guilty of 'wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties'. What he was doing was flashing his headlights at the oncoming traffic to warn them of a speed trap up ahead. Therefore he not only prevented a crime possibly being committed, although there was no evidence that those drivers were speeding anyway, but also by causing drivers to slow down possibly prevented accidents occurring.

They tell us speed cameras are a deterrent, to slow people down and to prevent accidents... Isn't this exactly what Mr Thompson helped them achieve?

Unless of course it's all about the money.

I’m still coughing nicely but I’m up for a game of squash tonight. In such circumstances, my opponent would of course have cancelled but then he daren’t lose. I have no such hangs up and I need the activity. A nice gentle game of squash is exactly what I need.

I survive and even win a game, using the tactics I picked up listening to Ian McEwan's book ‘Saturday’ in which he takes half an hour to describe a squash match in great detail.



I knew this frustrating book would come in useful in some way.

(Thursday 6th January)