The Dogcar

L has a freebie personal training session with a new chap at her gym who she describes as a muscle bound powerhouse but who turns out to be ‘quite a sweet chappie’. After he’s destroyed her to a pile of jelly he propositions her with an offer of six sessions for the price of four. She’s thinking about it.

The Astra or the Dogcar as it is now known is in for it’s MOT and Service. It failed on the windscreen wipers, a bulb, a track road end and bizarrely the handbrake needed adjusting. There’s never been anything wrong with that handbrake... All in all that’s pretty good for 215,000 miles. They fix everything and then decide it needs a new windscreen washer jet which they can't do until Monday.

It’s in the news that the long term landlord of the Victoria in Beeston and before that the Lincolnshire Poacher in Nottingham itself, Neil Kelso, has died at the age of 62. We are shocked.

(Friday 28^th June)

A Proposition

Earlier in the week L hit me with a proposition, park run. Park runs are free 5k runs in local parks run by volunteers. They’re also hellishly competitive.

I opt out, I’m not risking my ankle just yet and 5k is short and painfully fast for me these days. I would sprint it and my muscles would explode. Although perhaps I might do one with MD sometime. Not that that would do anything to stop my muscles exploding.

Still, I chivalrously kick L out of bed for her own good. The dogs and I come to support, considering it’s a 9am start this is quite a sacrifice of almost dog show earliness.

It’s at the Forest Rec and is the first one to be held there, so records are there to be had and some recognisable faces from local races are there clearly intent to get their names on the first leader board. I kick the ball around for the dogs in the middle of it all.

Then there's the match, where Derby lose to Ipswich in injury time. Afterwards I meet L and drag her out of Quad before she can order a second glass of wine. 

Then we get the bus over to Burton which is harder than you think. The running of the direct X38 service is now being shared by two companies, Trent Barton and Arriva but we can’t use our Mango cards on the Arriva service so either have to pay extra or wait for the Trent. We wait. It's a well confusing system.

We head to the National Brewery Centre and have a pint in their bar. Their own White Shield 5.6% is excellent. Their guest beers are disappointing though. We also eat there and over order on the bread. Then it’s our usual haunt the Coopers Tavern before searching out the Old Cottage Brewery’s pub which has some promising stuff but we don’t stop long as we have a bus to catch, which we miss and end up back in the the Coopers until the next one is due.

(Saturday 6^th April)

Something Appropriate For The 21st Century

After years of resisting, my company has finally managed to get me on to a training course with the intention of updating my computer skills to something appropriate for the 21st century. I previously managed to look so appalled at the prospect of a five day training course in London, that they dropped the idea for a full year.

Anyhow, their latest offer of two short two day courses in my home town of Nottingham seemed a difficult proposition to find fault with. So this morning I get to walk down into Nottingham with L before meeting up with a colleague, who is also on the course, and heading to the sophisticated surroundings of the Lace Market Hotel, where the course tutor will attempt to instruct us in newfangled internet development techniques.

The course turns out to be pretty good and the new language we're being taught not that dissimilar to what we do now. So it's all fairly easy to get the hang of. The hotel lunch was a bit disappointing though, not at all posh, as was expected. The sandwiches they brought us were a mix of cheese and tomato, egg mayonnaise and salmon on white bread with crisps. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind. They did bring some poshish salad I suppose, you know those inedible salad leaves you often see used as plate decoration.

It’s every runners dream... to set a new PB with little or no effort. Well, it seems a runner who had decided not to even compete still managed to trigger the timing at the start and finish with his timing chip that was in his bag and thereby knocked eight minutes off his PB and came top 20 as well. Well, at least that’s his story.

Daughter is heading to us from Sheffield today. I’ve helped her purchase two sets of train tickets. One set for coming home and another for getting herself to Skegness for a music festival thing tomorrow. So let confusion reign or in her words ‘it’s gonna go t*** up’. Thankfully it doesn’t.

It’s good to have her home... well, it's different anyhow.

(Thursday 24th November)