I have just come back from town. A trip down town is never countenanced lightly but on this occasion I had to buy Joe a pair of trousers before we go on holiday. The task was made harder by the fact that he was not there with me and I had instead his little brother John in tow. Anyway I came away with some trousers and bribed some peace off John by taking him to Cafe Nero.

I am not the biggest fan of sitting in coffee shops. I think people do it for the sake of it. This time was different. We had good window seats and my phone was out of order so I had to talk to my son! It was great.

We sat there looking out of the window. The biggest question was who was in the goldfish bowl? Was it us sat inside or was it all the other people scurrying along under their umbrellas or huddled overcoats. We were the smaller box but there again when you go and visit an aquarium you sometimes go through a small space under a tank and look at the sharks and fish swimming around you.

The right answer is in the mind of the questioner. There is no right answer and all answers are right, without question :-)  Just put that bit in as an afterthought and the smiley face indicates that I was quite pleased with myself. That is something completely within my control in this case. I could have chosen a different emotion. Exhibited surprise perhaps or even nonchalance. It isn’t beyond the realms of the imagination to see how one might say that sentence again in a nonchalant manner, twirling a stick as I go along. I don’t know how to do a nonchalant emoticon btw.

Anne’s cousin bought me a walking stick for my 40th birthday once. Ok ok I know I don’t sound as if I am forty. In fact I’m not. That was nearly ten years ago. Can’t believe it! I’m still a kid. Who but an immature adolescent boy could write such drivel anyway? Huh.

It’s not the warmest of rooms today, is the conservatory. Warmer than outside maybe but really merits a thicker sweater than I am currently wearing. I’m actually wearing an Animal hoodie, quite consistent with being an adolescent. My mum bought it for me last summer – there’s a general thread of consistency running right through this bit of writing don’t you think?

Well we can kill that one off straight away.

You don’t see much gold top milk in the shops these days. It’s mostly just full fat, semi-skimmed and skimmed. I’ve never quite seen the point of skimmed milk. It’s just coloured water if you ask me. Also once weaned off full fat, which is of course normal milk, and on to semi skimmed it is difficult to go back and the idea of drinking the ordinary stuff let alone gold top. There again, you never see it any more…

This leads nicely to the fact that I have just taken delivery of hte February issue of Agri-News, published for Manx farmers by the Department of Environment, Food and Agriculture. The kids signed me up for it when we were at the Southern Agricultural Show outside Castletown one summer holiday. We go there every year – the Isle of Man not the Agricultural Show. Not that I mind going to such shows. In fact I very much like em.

Its good to keep in touch with our farming roots. My lot were farmers if you go back far enough. These days the Davies family is in the internet business. Wasn’t much of it around way back when. In fact you don’t have to go back very far for there not ot have been internet. Its one of the reasons that the third law is not yet widely known, although I have never met anyone that either disagrees with the hypothesis (theory?) or has been able to disprove it.

I’m not sure whether either hypothesis or theory were the correct words (and there was no real reason for the word “theory” to be in brackets either) but you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Not a jot or an inch or a gobble or a quack. Note the mixing of terms of measurement there. The latter two were not even that but they instantly came to mind – from the song “If I were a rich man” AND NOT EVEN IN THE RIGHT ORDER. Caps accidentally switched on there but I couldn’t be bothered to undo them.

I once recorded the first verse of If I were a rich man on our answer phone – me playing the guitar. At the end of the song I just said “please leave a message”. I found later this was a mistake. I was away on business in the Soviet Union and every time I rang home I had to wait a whole minute before I could leave Anne a message. In those days the costs were something stupid like £5 a minute. Ah well. It was an expenses job anyway.

As I approach the one thousand word mark for this episode the words begin to slowly run out and stop exactly there.

3rd law part 8

Editor’s footnote: for authoritative post on rainfall measurement techniques see here.

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The concert had its good bits and some bits where the violins strained a bit – everyone is tired on a Friday night, but these occasions are the whole point of playing an instrument. I didn’t get to bed until nearly midnight but the body still wakes up early so here I am again, streaming.

There are three sounds I hear. One is the gas ring hissing away on the cooker. It’s too early to put the central heating on – it would wake Anne up. Instead I use the cooker.

The second sound is the clock and the third is the keyboard with me tapping away at it. I notice that I seem to do a lot of typos these days. Typographical errors as was in the days of the typewriter. Maybe it is only this morning because I am still a bit tired.

I will go back to bed when I take the tea up. That second doze is a good one. The typewriter would have made a much bigger noise of course. A real clacking. My iPad makes no noise at all. I probably switched off the keyboard sounds. Stealth typing. I don’t use the iPad for writing stuff that needs speed of finger and thought. Or should that be thought and finger?

Sounds almost like the name of a pub aimed at literary types. It almost certainly has book lined walls and maybe even uses remaindered pulp fiction as beer mats. There is some poetry in there somewhere, a statement. Your book was crappy so I’m just going to use it to stop my glass marking the table. Bathos? Is that the right word. Certainly a deep disappointment.

Perhaps not. The author probably just got paid a fee for churning it out to a recipe that some bimbo (male or female – I’ve just retargeted the definition on the fly to avoid accusations of sexism) thinks they find interesting or suitably mind numbing on the beach, or both if that is possible.

Have you noticed that my paragraphs are quite short. A lot shorter probably than in that bimbo’s book. I suspect it is all to do with the font size I use in Word. It makes words look bigger on the screen so I may artificially be shortening the paragraphs although I’m not sure that there is an international standard for paragraph length. It would be difficult because different countries have different average word lengths.

I said that in quite an authoritative manner though I’m not at all sure as to the veracity of the statement (good word veracity – slipped it in to see what you think). Authoritative is also a good word though I won’t labour the point. The Germans I know for a fact have some really long words. The Welsh are also known for them but in actual fact that is based on just a single village name in North Wales. Anglesey to be more specific. Anglesey isn’t the long word, its the place where the village is. I’m not going to reproduce the long word here. It would make this paragraph too long.

Carriage return sorry “enter”. “Carriage return” is dated. Readers of this stream of words should not be confused into thinking that this is a product of the 20th, or even the 19th centuries. When did they invent the typewriter? Who invented the typewriter come to think of it? I could find out but I’m not really that interested. Ditto the refrigerator.

Due to the sheer professionalism with which I approach the writing of this stuff you probably will not have noticed that I am now using Word2007. It has a lot more features than my previous version, Word2003, well it seems to, but the problem is that I am still learning it. It took me a while to find the “strikethrough” icon for example. But I’m starting to bore you here. Shakespeare didn’t leave comments in his margins informing readers that he had deliberated over his font size or the size of his quill.

My hand writing is terrible by the way. I would have been useless with a quill. Ink spots and crossings out everywhere.
For the technically minded amongst you I have written 698 words in roughly 45 minutes. I don’t know exactly because I haven’t yet worked out where to look for the statistics on this new Word package. I only know my approximate editing time because I looked up when I started tweeting this morning.

Enthusiasm is grinding to a halt now in any case as the body reminds me that it is still a tad tired and wants to take a cup of tea up to bed. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

3rd law part 9

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I’m staring at a towering in-tray. Most of the stuff in there can probably be thrown away or recycled. The point is I just don’t know because the higher the pile gets the less likely I am to tackle the job. It has to be said that usually when I do take on the task, which isn’t that often hence the height of the pile, I find a letter that I should have opened 2 months ago, or one that I had been waiting for but wondered why it hadn’t arrived yet.

It’s almost amazing that we still get physical mail. At work it will mostly be junk that gets binned immediately (or when I get round to it :)  ). Most people have learned to communicate by email, or instant message or twitter.

As the kids get older the snail mail system does lead to some amusing problems. Tom and I get letters addressed to T Davies. It irritates the heck out of him that I sometimes open his mail by accident. How was I to know? There hasn’t been anything uber-embarrassing yet. Just bank account type stuff.

Kids need to have their privacy though and at first it is a difficult one to get your brain round because “you have always controlled everything” when it comes to your kids. The hardest one was when he left home to go to university.

The old university thing is an interesting one. I did bugger all work when I went to uni. Had a great time. “Didn’t hurt me.” The problem comes when you have told your own kids that that is how you conducted yourself. Now I have nothing to contribute to the debate. As long as you pass and don’t get kicked out is all I can say.

You may have noticed a certain lack of flow in this writing this morning. It’s not because it’s morning. It’s because I keep jumping back and fore from twitter to Word. I keep doing it but not because I have an active twitter conversation on the go. Hardly anyone I know is awake. It’s because I’m addicted.

I freely admit this. It’s part of my rehab. It’s not really. That just came out but there could be a germ of an idea there. “The Philosopher On Tap rehab clinic for internet addicts”, specialising in healthy country walks without your phone. We could have individual lockers for people to keep their laptop battery and power supply so that internet access was denied.

For it to work people would have to admit that they have a problem in the first place which could be an issue. I’m not sure that “internet addiction” is a clinically recognised ailment yet. It should be though and someone has to invent or discover it for the first time. A bit like the “Third Law”.

There you go. I’ve just discovered something else. I won’t google it just in case someone else has already done so and not told me. That would be so disappointing. Can you detect an element of denial creeping in here? It’s a sure sign of addiction though I feel I am getting my addictions mixed up. How can one possibly have an addiction to wanting to have invented things?

I bet Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t have the same problem. Not that I am comparing myself with Leonardo you understand. He was the only inventor I could think of at such short notice. Barnes Wallis also springs to mind, the inventor of the bouncing bomb.  But I thought of Leonardo first and he probably invented more stuff than BW, not that I’m sure of my facts on this one.

Anyone who feels they have an addiction to the internet should leave a comment on this post. All comments will be treated in total confidence – our therapists are fully trained. Most of them have already been through the treatment themselves.

It can be quite tough at first so we do break you in gently. It typically starts by getting you to turn your phone to silent. That way you still have the comfort factor of the phone in your pocket but are already beginning the process of being weaned off. With the most difficult of cases we get them to gradually reduce the volume of their ring tone, or change the ring tone to something less intrusive.

I used to have “phone call for Trefor Davies, phone call for Trefor Davies” as my ring tone. My daughter recorded it. That would have been a good start for our treatment programme because I could never hear it – especially if I was in a pub and engrossed in conversation. I had to change it in the end because I kept missing phone calls and we must remember that the purpose of this treatment is not actually to stop you talking to people but to stop you using the phone to access the internet.

Talking is in fact encouraged under the POT Clinic rehab programme. POT Clinic makes it sound like something different. Mixed messages there. I might have to re-evaluate the name but it will do for now.

Branding is ever so important don’t you think:) . Most of my clothes have got one brand or another on them. It isn’t what you are thinking though. They are mostly ones I have been given for free through work – none of the names on the t-shirts are ones you would recognise. I’m not a poser, just a cheapskate.

Talking about t-shirts I am just making another pot of tea. I found 4 teabags in the tea pot. Obviously not cleaned out in between “rounds”. I use 3 teabags first thing in the morning but only two during the day. Need that little bit more of a kick first thing obviously. It isn’t a huge teapot.

3rd Law Part 8

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It’s six am on a Sunday in October and I am up and sitting in the kitchen. I thought I’d write some poetry but I have disruption going on inside my head. I keep mentally humming the tune “In the wee small hours of the morning, when the while wide world is fast asleep”. In fact I lie awake and think of all the girls and never ever think of counting sheep.

It is as if I have noise pollution going on in my brain. This isn’t an excuse for writer’s block. I imagine that where that is concerned there is nothing going on in there. I fancy a cup of tea but in thirty minutes or so I will be making a pot to take up toAnne so I’m not sure. The kettle is on now anyway. Strange but the kettle is quite noisy and all of a sudden that noise has replaced the song in my head.

I am not in control. I feel as if I should be able to dictate what goes on in my mind but outside factors are interfering. The kettle changes its tune as the water warms up. Good job it doesn’t have a whistle or the whole house would be woken up when it boils. It is very satisfying to hear it get to boiling point though and then that final click as it switches itself off. Then of course there is the period of calm as the tea brews followed by a decision making process going on inside the head. Is it ready to pour yet? Decisions, decisions. We are always having to make them.

It is a very uncluttered world at this time of day. There is nobody around either physically or in the virtual world. Twitter goes for a long time without any new tweets in the stream. Only my own. I compare it to walking down the high street in Lincoln on a Saturday morning and meeting no one. Weird. A bit like the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. There was hardly anyone about. They were all in watching the TV.

It’s quite strange really, especially if you are someone who is a natural communicator. Only yourself to communicate with. Imagine being in solitary confinement. You have the whole internet to play with but there is nobody else out there. No interactive online gaming, nobody changing Facebook status. 5 billion people have disappeared overnight and the only person left is you. Why? Where have they all gone? Do they know something that you don’t? Worrying!

I just checked Facebook. There are 4 friends online. Three in the UK and one in Californeye-a. I suspect that their statuses have just not changed.

The tea has brewed. The sound of the cup filling changes as I pour more tea into it.

The imaginary world where everyone has gone missing changes as the day grows older. People wake up and begin to change their status. If would be interesting if presence status included things like “just got married” or “just woken up” or “just got £10 richer because the 3.30 at Ascot just came in”. These should happen automatically without your input. In fact your avatar would change as you changed.

This probably has some advantages and disadvantages. Decisions about what to wear get easier. You put something on and look at the avatar to see if the jumper matches the trousers. You might also however spot that the trousers are getting too tight and that you need to go out and buy a bigger size. Or go on a diet - take your pick. Am I your mother? This isn’t a fool proof process however. I wouldn’t know whether a jumper matched a pair of trousers anyway so it only works for some people.

Information break – I have here written 635 words in 29 minutes – end of information break. Period.

I’m down to two online friends now. The Californian has gone. The Brit has either gone back to bed or has left early to open up the church and put out the hymn books. More likely the former but don’t knock the hymn books bit. It pays to be well prepared. Picture the scene where a coach turns up and the normally half empty church suddenly fills to overflowing with a busload of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury who upon realising the time decide to stop and attend a church service. None of them have brought their own hymn books. You don’t take a towel when you stay at a hotel do you? Anyway they all turn up unannounced. The vicar is delighted but there is a bit of a panic because there aren’t enough hymn books out for everyone. Understandable. It’s the same number of people most weeks so Doreen who puts them out usually knows exactly how many she is going to need plus a few extra just in case.

Well this time the few extra just isn’t enough. Come on Doreen get a move on we have customers. Doreen has to rush into the vestry to open the other cupboard. Those books haven’t been used for years. The dust goes flying everywhere but does Doreen care. Of course not. She is a pro. Approaching the line of patiently waiting pilgrims comes this pile of Hymn books, moving as if by themselves. What we can’t see is the diminutive Doreen hidden underneath and behind. She is a superwoman, her strength drawn from her deeply held religious beliefs.

The service went well. The visitors contributed voluminously to the singing. The regulars were pleased to see some new faces and afterwards over coffee the visitors regaled everyone with tales of pilgrimages past. When at last everyone had got back on the coach and had been waved off Doreen and the vicar turned to each other and sighed the deep sigh of a job well done.

As she turned to face the washing up Doreen realised with horror that they had just used up the next 4 weeks supply of biscuits. Never mind there would presumably be enough in the collection plate this week to buy some more.

The vicar went back inside to count up the collection. A couple of metal washers, two Euro cents, a souvenir penny from Skegness Butlins and an IOU promising to replace the money that had been “borrowed” next time they could make it to a cashpoint.

click here for part 7

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I wonder what the birds think at dawn when no man is around. Contempt I would imagine for why would anyone want to miss the best part of the day? The early worm will have gone!

I look out of the window and see the slightest of movement of leaves in the small plant pots on the doorstep. The air in the conservatory is still. The remains of yesterday lie scattered on the lawn. A table tennis bat, dismantled hammock frame, a blue plastic hoop and toys spilling out of a shed door that these days never closes. Can’t close.

That shed’s days are numbered. It is going to be a barbecue area with a grapevine growing round the side. I don’t do many diy jobs these days but we have a week at home booked in the summer holidays and that is the project. That and the occasional trip to the seaside and a couple of pints early doors in the Morning Star.

It’s not that I can’t do jobs around the house. It’s that I don’t have the time or the inclination. Weeks are so busy that the time at weekends is precious and not to be spent drilling, sawing or waving paintbrushes around indiscriminately.

Painting is a specialised job anyway. I know anyone can rub a surface down and slap on a bit of colour but in my view it is a specialist job that needs doing properly by an expert. Same as joinery, plumbing and for that matter making curries:) I’m not allowed to contract out the curry making too often which is a shame but doesn’t do me any harm I suppose.

I remember the first time I ever had a curry. It was in an Indian restaurant in Upper Bangor. I forget the name, something like the Taj Mahal. I just Googled it but no joy. I’m sure it is still there though the last time I went it had changed completely inside. It looked as if it had been stripped down in order to cope with and survive raucous drunken student Saturday nights. A far cry from the early days of sophistication and the discerning palate! Chicken biryani if anyone is interested though by the time my Bangor days were up I had moved on to meat vindaloo.

Before it was a curry house it was a burger joint called Capones. They did a terrific barbecue sauce there. When it changed food types I asked them for the recipe. All it was was tomato ketchup mixed with a bit of Worcester Sauce! Simplicity itself. I still haven’t tried making it myself but now I am reminded of it perhaps I will.

Cooking is quite therapeutic I find though Anne rarely lets me cook these days. I either take too long or it costs too much. All the great chefs in history have bene men though, note. Not that I’m complaining about her food. She does a mean quesadilla. I usually add some heat into it but that is ok.

We would have barbecues more often if it was up to me. It is the natural role of a bloke to stand there in the garden with a bottle of beer or glass of red wine in hand supervising the steaks. They don’t take long anyway. Just tsss tsss on either side and they’re done. Disproportionately quick compared to the time taken to get the charcoal to the right stage for cooking.

That in itself is a bone of contention in our house. Anne would accept a BBQ more often if I could guarantee what time the food would arrive. It’s a bit hit an miss though. We did invest in an Australian Gas job one but it eventually rusted to death. Apparently it is due to all the salt that drips out of the meat.

A thrush has just hopped by on the patio outside, for what it is worth. Something in its mouth – I couldn’t quite see what.

We now have a posh stainless steel firepit – Danish I believe and for what it is worth. When we have finished cooking we take off the griddle and put logs on. It’s a great way to finish off an evening. The smoke from the fire keeps the insects away so you can sit out for as long as you like. You do end up being a bit smoky but what the heck.

Google tells me it is going to be 26 degrees Centigrade today so ideal for a Barbie. I’ll light it up after the England v Germany world cup match. It’s a big one hereabouts. The old nemesis. There is a mixture of “here we go a gain” and “we’re going to beat the buggers this time” in the air. I placed a bet yesterday – on my way out of Antonio’s barbers on Wragby Road. £5 on Germany to win after penalties.

Not very loyal I know but you must remember I am Welsh and I figured that it would be poetry in winning the bet under those circumstances. I got 9 – 1 so will get £50 back. Might spend it on a curry

The bane of our back garden are the wood pidgeons. Always very noisy with this repetitive and irritating whoop. I have considered borrowing an air rifle to remove the problem but that isn’t really me. I don’t know what is me really. A nice and friendly easy going bloke who wants to live and let live I suppose.

Coming back to the temperature I moved the potted lemon tree outside yesterday. It isn’t very big even though we have had it a few years now in the conservatory. It doesn’t get watered much that’s why although I have started doing it more often this year since I’ve been watering my chilli plants, a couple of which, by the way, have started to flower. Exciting stuff.

Anyway the lemon plant/bush/tree is outside now and in my mind if I give it regular soaks during this Mediterranean spell of weather it will thrive. It has had a few flowers this years so I will have to replenish the gin stocks soon, with a bit of luck.

I used to drink gin, normally on a Sunday afternoon whilst cooking the Sunday roast but I have fallen out of the habit. The only time the level in the bottle moves these days is when mam or a sister comes to stay. Then it seems to plummet, or maybe I keep leaving the top off and it is down to evaporation.

At one time we built up a pretty good cocktail cabinet actually though it has fallen into disrepair. In other words we have drunk most of it and not replenished the stocks. It isn’t a cheap hobby and since the kids came along we don’t entertain much anyway.

Talking of birds a few more people have started surfacing on twitter now. It’s as if the night shift is almost over and the day workers are starting. It will soon be time for me to take Anne up a cup of tea.

Link to next 3rd law post here.

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I was out kayaking this morning and drifting around in the breeze on the lake my mind drifted up to see lots of fluffy white clouds drifting by. I thought to myself, how wonderful. I thought how can I write something artistic about those fluffy white clouds? But then it occurred to me that it must be practically impossible to write anything about fluffy white clouds that hasn’t already been written. They are such an obvious thing for people to get all wistful and romantic about.

The old lateral thinking machine did kick in and I then had one of those eureka moments. Clouds = internet. Hmm. A bit tenuous really. How do you go from kayaking and then watching clouds to talking about tinternet? Who cares.

I don’t know how tinternet got to be described in terms of clouds. Is tinternet just another in the dictionary of clouds? Cumulus nimbus, stratus, tinternet. Dear ISP, I can’t get my cumulus nimbus to work because my broadband isn’t working properly. Probably not. I wonder whether tinternet carries rain in it that is discharged as it rises in a flow of cold air.

There’s plenty of hot air on tinternet I’m sure though I’m not so sure about the cold stuff. It isn’t as if rain and computers would get on anyway or they would have to invent waterproof computers. They probably have already. Get your Goretex lined PCs here. Guaranteed to keep the water out and let all that hot air through. I think I should patent that one. I hope nobody else got there before me. Well I will probably get round to it sometime anyway.

It seems likely that since they invented tinternet lots of the jobs that used to get done around the house at evenings and weekends just don’t get done now. Nobody has the time. Everyone is constantly checking eBay to see whether their bid has been beaten, or Facebook to look at someone else’s holiday snaps or twitter.

This does of course make this a very dated piece of writing. In 100 years time people will have never heard of twitter unless they have been attending some very specialised history lessons.

I’m into history meself. Got a pile of books queuing up to be read both in the kitchen and in the bedroom. I even sometimes keep one or two in the downstairs loo. No sense in wasting time while you are in there. Only trouble is I’m never in there long enough to really get into a book so I keep rereading over old bits. I find myself saying “Dang it, I’ve already read this bit”. Then I flick around to try and identify where I actually should be and before I know I’ve finished and it’s time to get up, so to speak.

I even have one book that was an A Level History text book when my wife Anne was at school. She can’t understand how I can like reading this stuff. I did buy here Bridget Jones’ Diary once, a long time ago and she actually read that one twice. Other than that Anne is a doer not a reader.

I can’t do any jobs around the house unless it is written down on a jobs list. It all comes from when we first got married. We didn’t have a dishwasher in those days (for American readers – I know unbelievable eh?) so we would take it in turns. One day it was my turn. There I was scrubbing away, feeling quite content with myself having cleared out the whole bowlful of dishes, when another pile of pots and pans was duly deposited in the sink. This was totally disheartening.

I realised then that I needed to be able to see the size of the task ahead of me in order to be able to get it done to any degree of satisfaction. Where dishes were concerned I needed to know the full scope of the job. This led to me starting physical jobs lists. If it wasn’t written down then it wouldn’t get done. After her initial exasperation at this Anne realised that this could work and each weekend I would be presented with an old envelope with a long list of jobs on the back of it.

This isn’t as bad as you might think because what was not written down was the timescale in which the jobs had to be done. I would assess the damage on Saturday morning and say “that one’s a half-dayer, this one’s an hour”, the point being that they would not all necessarily be done immediately.

The system did work, though my control element was tested as when I had crossed some jobs off Anne had a tendency to add more to the list. This was not acceptable. I wanted to see the whole list done before moving on to another. It was the same mental issue as not wanting more dishes put in the sink. Works for me anyway.

We also have clashes on the writing things down front when it comes to diaries. Anne keeps a diary on the wall by the door into the kitchen. On it she writes all her forthcoming appointments, charity lunches, coffee mornings etc. There is a column for each of us in thefamily and she dutifully fills in the kids dates as appropriate – dentist etc.

Unfortunately I don’t use the diary in the kitchen. I use the calendar on my PC. In fact I’ve just moved on to using Google Calendar. This leads to some confusion when Anne arranges something and finds that I am unavailable. “But you didn’t write it on the calendar”. The ups and downs of family life eh?

click here for part 5

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I’ve been potting some chilli plants. Got the seeds a few weeks ago in Focus Do It All and sowed them in a tray in the conservatory. As if by magic the seedlings started to come through and got to a point where I deemed it appropriate to move them into pots. In all I have 20 or so, some of which I have moved outside and one that I took In to the office. When I am not in my room I jack the aircon temperature up as high as it will go. He he he. Looking forward to plenty of burn later in the year when I get harvesting.

I’m not really a gardener. I live just down the road from Tesco. However it is sometimes nice to do gardening type stuff. Usually it is a rush of blood that gets things into the ground but after that the weeds take control. Pesky things :). I did plant a lot of peas one year and managed to get a couple of portions out of it all. Shame really because freshly picked peas are the best. Problem is you need to plant them in industrial quantities to get a sensible amount. You do in our allotment anyway.

We are quite lucky in having an allotment over the back fence. It’s the plot nearest our house and we have a gate opening into it. The initial enthusiasm waned years ago and now we grow mostly weeds. Adrian over the back has taken half of it. He puts us to shame. they haven’t got any kids mind you so they have that luxury called time.

Ade (I don’t call him that – don’t know if anyone does, or Aidy come to that) is a lecturer in Economics at the University and he is also a dab hand at the piano. Can play anything. We have on occasion had a jam with me on the geetar and him on keyboards. Don’t do it often enough really. Last Christmas he and Sian didn’t make it to our usual singsong bash but fortunately we had Ervin the Hungarian Concert Pianist turn up out of the blue.

I had not met Erv before but he was a real revelation. He and Joe and I played a few jazz numbers. We went on until quite late. It’s good to have a solid pianist in the trio – keeps the whole set going. Ours is one of those electric keyboards with zillions of different sound options.

We had a normal piano when I was a kid in Cardiff. I seem to recall dad inheriting from someone and carting halfway across Wales. I might be wrong. Anyway the point is that having had a few lessons none of the kids really took to it and came the day of reckoning where it had to go. It was just taking up too much room in the house. Rather than pay to remove it dad just took a sledgehammer to it and demolished it in the back garden. We made a coffee table out of the polished side panel. That was one expensive coffee table.

I remember having piano lessons off Mrs Ryan Davies. Ryan was a famous Welsh comedian from the Ryan and Ronnie duo. Bit like a Welsh Morecambe and Wise. I didn’t think anything of the fact that I was in his house for the piano lessons. Ryan died quite young. He had a similar problem to Dylan Thomas apparently.

A few years ago my sister Sue and I went to Laugharne to visit Dylan Thomas’ home. It was where he wrote many of his famous poems. As a source of inspiration it is a wonderful little place. Small seaside town., plenty of bird life. Probably didn’t have many tourists before Dylan Thomas settled there and died. Thanks a bunch Dyl, the locals probably said. Does bring money into the local economy though, I suppose, although we didn’t pay to go into his house. Skinflints of what? It’s only a house for goodness sake.

On the way there Sue got a bit irritated because I was talking in an exaggerated South Wales accent. So I stopped. Then when we got to Laugharne I noted the fact that there was a Dylan Thomas tea room (very nice – I had Welsh Cakes). Continuing with the theme I pointed out many other Dylan Thomas features. The Dylan Thomas Post Office. The road that Dyl used to walk along to the pub. The lamppost that he would lean against on his way home, the Dylan Thomas bench, where he would stop for a rest and also the bush that he would stop to pee behind. This all got to Sue in the end so I had to stop that too ?.

Sue’s a violinist you know. We are a very musical family.

Outside as I write it is a classic spring day – cold and wet. There is a bit of sunshine poking through which does bring a very small ray of hope for the rest of the day. Not sure what the forecast is though. More cold and rain probably. It is very reassuring, this British weather. It it was nice all the time we wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t anyway. I don’t think that makes me a weirdo. It’s just what we are used to.

I can’t imaging going on holiday somewhere hot and spending all my time lying on the beach for two weeks. I don ‘t like the sand anyway although the view does sometimes provide compensations. We did once go to Mick Hynan’s place in Spain. It was too hot for me really though we did have a good time.

I bought a Spanish Guitar from Cartagena. I liked the idea of going to Cartagena. It evoked romantic thoughts of the Spanish main and fighting against Spanish Galleons. Also reminded me of the Laurie Lee book “As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning”. It’s the one where he walks round Spain playing the violin for his upkeep.

That book was a real inspiration to me when I was a student. It made me want to get up and go somewhere. At the end of the Summer Term I bought a rucksack, packed some basics and stuck my thumb out. I had with me a piece of cardboard with “St Tropez” written on it. Believe it or not I made it to St Tropez. I didn’t like it there though. It was far too expensive so I moved on and found myself in Greece. It’s a longer story than I have time for here – after all we are talking tinternet time – but I will tell it one day.

It’s quite amazing that tinternet didn’t exist when I were a student. Nether did mobile phones, or PCs. Didn’t do me any harm! Time must have dragged in those days. Spent most of it in cafes and pubs. Isn’t that what students do? I’m just looking forward to when I can do that all again. Probably won’t hitch hike to Greece though. More likely to fly, or take a boat maybe.

I’ve been thinking about buying a medium sized yacht and sailing off into the sunset, although if I was heading east to Greece it would obviously not be into the sunset. Probably never happen. I’d have to learn about navigation and stuff like that. We shall see. There’salso the problem of the money to pay for it.

I’ve never had any money. That’s not to say money doesn’t come into the bank account every month. I am a salaryman. Somehow it never seems to stick around. It’s why I only take £50 out of the bank at a time. If I took £100 out it would last the same amount of time as the £50. There must be something in that, just like the Third Law of Tinternet. It’s probably called Keynes’ Theorem of Cashflow or some similar title. I’m not going to look it up though. In case I’m disappointed and there isn’t one although that would of course mean that I had invented it myself in which case it would be Tref’s Theorem of Cashflow.

I remember being the first to get a round in in the Morning Star a few years ago. Many years ago actually. Anyway the point is having got the first round in and then everyone else taking their turn it came around to me again. I ordered the drinks for everyone then found out that the twenty pounds I had in my wallet was not twenty pounds. In fact it wasn’t any pounds. Anne had pinched it thinking, reasonably fairly, that the first twenty pounds would be enough. As it happened the beer had flowed freely and we had a few Sheilas in tow drinking exotic stuff like gin and tonic which had seemed to up the total cost of a round. The absence of cash actually got me out of paying for the round though you can’t use that one too often.

It’s like using your grandmother’s funeral as an excuse to skive off work. You can only use it twice. Both mine died years ago though I’m not sure that anyone in the office knows that. Hmm…

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I’m back in my usual seat in the corner of the kitchen. It’s a pew we bought from Anne’s church, St Peter in Eastgate, for £130. I’m told that the going rate at auction is £30 but what the heck. It’s charidee. £130 is what the new flexible seating costs per seat.

The church’s loss is my gain. As seats go it is absolutely rock solid. Bedded in by thousands of bottoms, mostly now dead and buried. There is something poetic about having it in the kitchen with me, a confirmed atheist, sat on it writing. I also eat on it of course. The kids fight to sit on it when we are eating.

During its life as a repository for worshippers I estimate it could have sustained 6 large adults, at a push, sat or kneeling. Perhaps one more for a wedding or funeral. Now occupants have to be able to reach the kitchen table which realistically can only sit 4 on a side, and then not exactly in huge comfort. So it is funny when we sit down and they all try and sit on the pew, leaving a huge part of the table circumference free for me and mum. I’d prefer to sit on the pew meself but in the competitive life of the family you have to be quick on the draw and the teenagers often beat me to it.

We have an enjoyably large kitchen with two kitchen tables. A luxury I know but I work hard for it. We play snooker in the kitchen although the snooker table, brought from home and one I had as a boy in the Isle of Man, has seen better days. The cushions are pretty dead. Also we can never get it level but it doesn’t really matter. It’s more about the playing of the game than the finer points nature of the sport.

I remember going to see the semi finals of the world snooker championships many years ago. Probably twenty five years! Aargh. I went with Dave Hopkins who had secured the tickets. We both had serious hangovers the day we went and I just about made it out to his place in time for the lift.

The championships were in Sheffield and we got there in time to creep in at the back for our right at the back seats during the morning session. I think we were watching Cliff Thorburn or some such star. At the end of the morning session, which is all we had tickets for, we went along to the box office on the off chance that there were some spaces available for the next session. We hit the jackpot. We ended up sat on the front row right next door to Steve “interesting” Davis.

Steve was at the height of his powers and these were seriously good seats. We would have been on the TV for much of the time. I should see if there are recordings of that match. 1984 or 1985. I can only assume that someone had bought tickets for the whole tournament and decided to sit out the semifinals otherwise I have no explanation as to why those tickets were available.

Can’t remember who won. Probably Steve interesting Davis. These days I play with my youngest son John who has a great eye for the ball and slots in some amazing pots, and his youth has not been misspent, yet!

Fast forward a night and dawn is a coming. When I sat down on the pew this morning there was blackness outside. Despite the darkness the birds were in full voice. Twenty minutes later there is enough light in the garden to be able to see the silhouette of the trees, and the birds have gone quiet. Probably getting busy digging up worms, now that they can see what they are doing. I expect the worms think, uhoh, dawn!

It’s a tough life being a worm. Wriggling about in the dirt with, as far as I know, no chance of betterment. I guess if they were Buddhist worms they might be ok, as long as they had lead a good worm life, though gawd knows how you do that. Just making sure the soil is well aerated I suppose and then finally offering yourself up as a meal to a blackbird with a hungry family to feed. The ultimate sacrifice though one with an ulterior motive.

The drain in front of our garage door fills up with leaves every year and every year when I clear it out it is filled with worms who have turned the leaves into the most wonderful compost. I should have though of that a couple of days ago when I sowed some chilli plant seeds. It would have been a good base for them. There is already one green shoot showing though I can’t imagine it is a chilli plant. It must be a weed. I got the compost from the bottom of the garden.

Still I’m looking forward to a successful first chilli plant season. As time goes by my requirements in terms of chilli heat have gone up. When we are out for a pizza with the kids I usually go for the hottest available and it is often disappointing. This summer I will be able to take my own chillies. I’ll have a “diavolo” please. Oh and slap these extra chillies on would you? The kids are constantly amazed.

I thought I was on safe ground last weekend when we got a delivey from Dominos. I had my usual extra chillies and had half a large pizza left uneaten at the end of the meal. Unusual! Anyway the next day I went on a Morning Star pub day out to Bletchley Park. In my mind the remainder of the pizza was supper when I got home. Of course when I did eventually get home, quite late as we had stopped at several pubs on the way, I discovered that Tom had scoffed the pizza. Although I was mildly miffed I was also quietly proud that he was developing what is a manly taste for heat. Good job we had eaten on the way.

There’s a funny story there because at the second pub we visited four of us thought we were eating and so had ordered meals. Turns out that nobody else was eating. They were all saving themselves for the ”Tally Ho”, a renowned pub with food just south of Sleaford. No problem. We ate our meal in a timely manner and got back on the minibus. On our way we joked that the Tally Ho had probably had a kitchen fire and couldn’t serve food that night, or was shut. When we got there we found that in fact the Tally Ho was completely full and was not serving bar meals unless you had a reservation!!

The beer was good though but that didn’t help those who had not yet eaten and were now getting quite hungry. We ended up making a diversion to the chippy at Waddington which was taken by surprise and didn’t have enough chips cooked for everyone. Half the contingent had to wait. Life’s rich tapestry.

It was a good day out, although somewhat of an indulgence as I am very busy with work during the week and expected to do something with the kids at the weekend. Bletchley Park was great. We had the added bonus of having Dennis the Spy with us. Dennis’ first job had been working at Bletchley Park, more years ago than he would care to admit to. He regaled us with stories of the time.

For the uninitiated Bletchley was the top secret place where they cracked the German Enigma codes during the Second World War. It was still working as a listening post when Dennis was there and he showed us the basic radio sets that they used to use. He would spend hours twiddling the dial until he found a frequency with something being transmitted. His job was just to record what was transmitted. He wouldn’t get to do the decoding. A bit boring really.

The best bit was his story about swimming the lake in front of the mansion. In those days the pub used to be open for only two hours on a Sunday lunchtime. Dennis had a bet that he could consume eight pints of Guinness in these two hours. That’s one pint every fifteen minutes, for the mathematically challenged. Ever the trooper Dennis met the challenge and won the bet. Having been kicked out after the legally allowed drinking up time he then considered it a good idea to take a shortcut home across the lake so he stripped off and dived in. Good lad. I have a photo of the lake if anyone is interested.

It’s completely light out now and I note that the blackbirds are indeed out in force looking for worms in the garden. I wonder what they do when they have had enough nosh. Move over dear, there’s room for another small one on the nest. Isn’t it time we were thinking of eggs?!

Talking of which it is Easter as I write. As the kids get bigger the pile of eggs they have to consume has diminished. Not a bad thing really I suppose. Teeth and all that. I can’t remember how many Easter eggs we used to get when we were small. I’m sure it is nothing compared to the number they get these days. Last year there was a glut. Tesco seemed to have got it wrong and had too many left at the end so they were selling them off dirt cheap. This year I’m told there are none left. Probably learnt their lesson after last year or the fact that there is no longer a Woolworths around to compete with them. Perhaps a combination of the two.

I only used to go to Woolworths about once a year anyway, when trying to come up with ideas for Christmas presents. I’m sure that’s the case for many others and likely a part of the reason why they went bust. I’m sorry but I wasn’t going to go more often just to keep a national institution going. I used to go when I was a kid to buy LPs and singles. Also pick and mix sweets and fishing tackle. I would buy these garish spinners that never caught a single fish. The trout would take on look at them and snub their noses. “Huh i’f I’m going to be caught he will have to do better than that”. I never did catch one. I didn’t even like fish in those days though I’m sure that mam and dad would have helped me out.

We used to go fishing in Injebreck reservoir. It was about seven miles away from the house, a lot of it uphill. It was a really tough slog getting there. Getting back was fine of course. Downhill! They were the classic long hot summer holidays where I would disappear for the day on the bike. Only half the time was spent fishing. It isn’t particularly interesting if you don’t catch anything. The rest of the time we just lounged around at the water;s edge or went for a walk around the lake.

It reminded me a bit of Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons books. In my imagination the end of the lake could be a place of mystery and excitement. We used to buy an ice cream from the warden’s house. Manx Ices. They only sold wafers I seem to recall but that did the job nicely. The best ice cream that was ever made, Manx Ices. The firm unfortunately doesn’t exist now though Davisons is nearly as good. Not sure they make wafers any more though. Some health and safety rule somewhere no doubt, or maybe weights and measures. I don’t know.

It was a great place to be a teenager the Isle of Man. Plenty of action in the summer. In those days there were loads of summer jobs. One year, the year I left school, I was a conductor on the Isle of Man Electric Railway. The best summer job you could ever hope to have. The pay was good and I spent each day trundling up and down the track to Laxey and back. A conductor’s main job was to check the tickets and keep an eye on the “trolley” that hooked the tram up to the electric cable. If it came off, as it sometimes did, you had to swiftly get it back on again.

The Electric Railway was a superior job to the horse trams. They worked you hard on the horse trams. Long hours too. Still they were both good jobs and I guess the point is that there were the jobs around and plenty of tourists to go with it. They were heady days. We still ride on the trams every year when we go back on holiday, for old times sake. We have the same group photo, taken year after year, of all of us huddled in front a of a wet Laxey Station. The kids just look a little bigger in each one.

Laxey is a cracking place to visit. It used to have a working mine, tin or lead, I can’t quite remember though I could no doubt look it up on tinternet. It still has the big wheel, the Lady Isabella. Worth a visit, once. Also a few caffs and lovely pebble beach and small harbour. Good place to go fishing as it doesn’t suffer from seals in the same way as you do in Peel.

Changing the subject completely everyone else is out at Church at the moment. Well not everyone. Hannah and Tom are upstairs but the house is very quiet. I can also see a sparrow in the back garden. Actually I have no idea whether it is a sparrow or not, which is a bit of an admission. I do have a couple of bird watching books, specifically for the purpose of whipping out quickly to do a bit of species recognition. However they are always kept tidied up in the utility room or somewhere and by the time I get them out the bird has gone.

Blackbirds, robins, blue tits, woodpidgeons I can do. Red kites too. I actually saw about 6 red kites in a day once when doing some family tree research in West Wales. I come from a very rual area, going back a bit, and red kits like rural areas, so it would seem. It was sufficiently In the middle of nowhere for me to be without telephone reception for 30 minutes at one point, driving on my way to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. It’s always a lot farther than it seems on the map.

The NLW yielded a very productive afternoon for me the first time I went there. Because it was further than it looked I was a bit late getting there and the librarian’s first response was to tell me that he didn’t think there would be enough time to retrieve from archive the long list of Welsh Baptist tomes I wanted to read. After the intial disappointment another librarian came up and said that he had the exact pile I was looking for kept ready in the back room. I had fortuitously ordered them all in advance on line. Good ole tinternet.

That year I uncovered some amazing facts about my family history. I come from a long line of Baptist ministers! What’s more my Great Great Great Great Grandfather’s nephew (my cousin umpteen times removed – no idea how many but no doubt Google would tell me) was the first Welsh Baptist missionary to die in Africa. The Reverend William Davies.

His story was amazing. He, his pregnant wife Charlotte, and two year old son ,also William, set off from London in January 1832 to go to Grahamstown in South Africa. It took a month to make it as far as Plymouth. They were then shipwrecked in the Cap Verde Islands. I found an actual account of the shipwreck on tinternet. The son was unfortunately drowned and his wife gave birth to twins on the beach, one of who died.

It too two months for them to be rescued and taken back to the UK whereupon they started again! They finally made it out to Grahamstown in November 1832. That’s some dedication. Unfortunately conditions weren’t great out there and the wife died in 1836 of what sounds like Tuberculosis later followed by the Rev Davies a couple of years later in 1838. His reports back to the Baptist Missionary Society are all available on line. They were printed in the Baptist Magazine, available online in Google books!

Doing your family tree online is a classic exposition of the THIRD LAW. It takes long hours of painstaking research, all of which races by. I have hit the point of diminishing returns as far as family trees go. To get much more info is going to take a lot longer. I’m as far back as 1766 ish and need to be on the ground in West Wales to get further. Hopefully tinternet will catch up and more records will go online soon. I know the Mormons are at it and the last time I was in Carmarthen registry office they said that the parish registers would all soon be online. That’ll save some diesel.

click here for part 3

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Anyway on this day I decided to do it differently. Like driving to work in a different way to the way you normally go. When I drive to work I’m usually on autopilot anyway. I don’t notice the route. I set off and I get there. Sometimes I wonder whether I should worry about this but what the heck! There’s something about that drive. I can’t tell from one day to another whether the traffic is going to be good or bad. Except in the school holidays when there is never any traffic. Why would anyone ever want to go on holiday during the school holidays? The drive to work is pure bliss. In the summertime you can even get lulled into a false sense of security and think it is always like this.

In fact I never take any extra time off at Christmas. It’s a choice between sitting at home staring out the window at the weather or an easy drive to work and a no pressure few days without the phone ringing. When that phone rings I sometimes have to steel myself to answer it. But not at Christmas time. You still get the same chocolate experience as if you were sat around at home all day pretending to have a good time. Playing Monopoly and hoping they don’t spot you slipping a few hundred extra from the bank into your pile of money. So Christmas at work is good, although it can drag. Not that I have many options for routes to work which isn’t exactly the same as when I’m sat in front of that computer looking at Google which is where we came in.

Google. In the beginning it was just a search engine, admittedly with a cool name. Then it took over, started to take control. I know it isn’t really Google doing it. It’s the web thing, tinternet as people round here call it. Still whatever it is I am no longer in charge. I know I’m the one doing the clicking but I’m not really deciding where to go. It makes me think of when you go shopping in the supermarket. You pick the goods off the middle shelf, or at eye level where they get noticed most. At least that’s what they say. Marketing types. Get to the point you say. Well there isn’t really a point. It all just happens. It just happens.

I have a few home pages really. There are my two blogs, work and play, YouTube, Facebook, twitter and iGoogle. I can get most things through gadgets on iGoogle but at the moment I use different tabs for each site. I like having the tabs. If I can’t write I just surf. You have to be careful not to end up with too many open tabs or browser windows though because it just ends up cluttering your screen. Desktop. When I used to use MSN I’d end up having lots of IM sessions going at the same time. It got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with the conversations. In the end I stopped using it. That was years go now.

Other things have taken over my life. I have already mentioned them. Couch potato isn’t really an adequate description to describe me these days. In fact I work long hours, both in the office and at home. I’m in the internet business. Internet potato maybe a better description of me. Hunched over a keyboard another day goes by without exercise, fresh air or often even daylight.

It’s almost hearkens back to the days of my grandfather. He was a miner and would in winter get up when it was dark, spend the whole day underground only coming to the surface when it was dark again. I assume this was the case, I never met him. Not because it was always dark. It’s because miners don’t live to an old age. Or at least they didn’t use to.

Nowadays we don’t have miners. Not in our plastic, pixel packaged tinternet world anyway. I can probably look up some pictures of miners in action, using Google, or videos on YouTube, although you wonder whether anyone films that sort of thing. It’s a bit dark down a mine. Pixels probably wouldn’t show up.

My grandfather didn’t lack exercise, for his upper body. Like me he would spend long hours hunched in a confined space. But it was all strenuous manual stuff. There was none of this mechanisation business. With tinternet the only strain involved is RSI in the wrist that holds the mouse. He died relatively young, from “the dust”. My father remembers towards the end he would ask to open the windows to let some air in but the windows were already wide open. It was rare for miners to reach retirement age and quite common for the males of whole families to die early.

Dad’s experience of life in a mining community coloured his politics. But despite being a supporter of the miners strikes of the seventies deep down he would admit that it wasn’t a bad thing for the mines to close. It was a tough and dangerous living.

You sometimes feel as if the tinternet is dangerous these days. Wild wild web I sometimes say. There are so many scare stories about people “phishing” for your bank account details. I even have a friend who fell for one of the scams and actually gave his bank details away. You have to say stupid bugger. However, there but for fortune…

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but the thing about tinternet is that time seems to disappear into it. This must be a physical phenomenom. The THIRD LAW of tinternet. Don’t know what the first and second laws are but there you go. Maybe there is only a THIRD LAW. Anything can happen these days. If anyone knows can they please tell me. It’s easy enough to find me – just Google my name.

THIRD LAW OF TINTERNET: if you make a cup of tea whilst surfing better drink it quickly otherwise it will be cold before you know it.

I found out about the THIRD LAW one morning when I woke up early. I was lying in bed awake wondering what to do. My wife is a light sleeper so I just lay there just trying not to wake her. Since I got a Nokia N97 I can just hide it under the covers and read my mails, do Facebook etc etc. Before then I’d get up and take my laptop downstairs and do stuff.

So that day, like many others I went downstairs. What I found was that if I went down at five thirty the next minute it was six thirty and time to make a cup of tea. That’s a whole hour disappeared. No doubt I could track my history to see exactly what I’d done in that hour but it does seem miraculous. Now not being the slightest bit religious I have always thought that there must be a good explanation behind all these so called miracles that saints get the credit for. But I can’t explain this disappearance of time.

The THIRD LAW was thus discovered. There is clearly evidential proof there though I’m not sure how you would go about deriving it from first principles. I can see the need to have some funded research on this subject. I’d do it myself, if I had the time. Perhaps it is one of the aspects of the THIRD LAW that it can never be completely explained because by its very nature there can never be enough time devoted to the subject.

One of the stranger aspects of the THIRD LAW is that there is absolutely no point in making the cup of tea at the beginning of the session because as we have already heard the tea will be cold by the time you get round to drinking it. Perhaps the THIRD LAW is actually not about the disappearance of time at all. Perhaps it is about tea going cold. We will probably never find out.

I quite often wake up early, especially in the summer. It’s quite nice to go downstairs and soak in the early light. There’s quite a racket out there at dawn. Everything they say about a dawn chorus is true. It is in our back garden anyway. I once spent the night in a tent in the garden with one of the kids. We were woken at stupid o’clock by an avian racket. We didn’t realise how early it was so we just got up and went back in to the house. Only to find it was about five o’clock. It was too noisy to stay in the tent anyway. I think we just went back to bed.

One year after a camping expedition to Woodhall Spa we got home with a soaking tent. The only way we could get it dried was to drape it around the conservatory. This was fine and indeed it did get dry. We couldn’t use the conservatory for ages though and couldn’t get the tent back into the bag. It’s such a big tent that we didn’t have space in the house to fold It properly so it spent the winter chucked into the trailer in the front garden. Packed it the following summer.

We bought the tent after the previous one pretty much fell apart. It had taken a lot of hammer over the years. Our oldest son took it to a scout jamboree somewhere and put it up inside someone’s mess tent one night for a joke. No idea where it ended up but at least he got a laugh out of it. I suppose. Anne had never liked that tent because she couldn’t stand upright in it and there was no hairdryer point. So the new tent has an atrium for cat swinging with attachments for the trapeze to hook onto. It also has a discrete hole in the corner for the electric extension cable to squeeze through. It probably even has a place to hang the hairdryer if I look closely enough.

If anyone is interested the tent is a Gelert Zenith 6. It has three sleeping pods that are each intended for two people but in practice are large enough to fit three, especially if they are small. We have never seen the need to fit in more than 6 though which is the size of the family.

We found the Gelert Zenith 6 using Google. Marvellous. I can’t remember what we paid for it but I’m sure we got the best deal available. The only problem really is that on tinternet you don’t get a good feel for how big something is. Also how heavy – it takes two of us to carry.

Another aspect of the THIRD LAW I have just thought of is the fact that it can make decision making very difficult. It took me a few months to decide on a tent. The car was nearer two years. I spent weeks of my life reading and re reading reviews, watching video clips (thanks YouTube) and looking out for the best deal. By the time I bought it I knew what a good deal was. The car I bought was actually cheaper than it would have been when I first started looking but that was mainly because so much time had gone by and it was that much older.

If I hadn’t wanted a car I could have spent the time writing a book or getting a Law Degree or something. I don’t actually want a Law Degree but I might have gone for the something, whatever that is. Could have been good! Still I ended up buying a car so that’s good too. I’m happy with it.

There is just too much information out there. That’s why I normally just stick to the same old websites. Like I said.

Sometimes the same old websites can get a bit boring. I keep looking but there is very little change. Even on twitter. You get such a lot of inane crap on twitter. I’ve started unfollowing people who talk crap. They probably think the same of me. I don’t mind some crap. I don’t even mind people saying good morning. Do it myself sometimes, in moderation. That’s what twitter is all about, ish.

Identifying what is and isn’t crap is a way for me to sort out who I would probably get on with and who I wouldn’t. In real life that is. I’m unlikely to strike up a friendship with someone who has completely opposite musical tastes to me, for example. Though actually thinking about it I probably have no idea what most of this music is because I don’t listen to it anymore. Except for the cd I keep in the car in case there’s nothing on the radio, but I do get a bit bored with that one listening to it over and over again.

I’ve just discovered that my Nokia N97 can act as an FM transmitter which means that I will be able to broadcast music from my phone onto the stereo in the car. I think it’s a great idea. Only problem is that I haven’t taken it any further yet. I have to physically transfer stuff from my PC to my phone. Manyana maybe.

The PC has been a bit of a nuisance lately because my power supply stopped working so I was having to buddy up with my son Tom. His laptop battery has the life expectancy of a gnat so it meant that he got to use it a lot more than I did. By the way I have no idea what the life expectancy of a gnat is but I expect it isn’t very long.

You might be asking why Nokia N97 and not iPhone, Nexus One or any other trendy gadget. No particular reason other than that was the one they had in stores at work. I do like it though. The screen went on my old phone, again, so I thought well that’s that. And it is. I feel a bit trendier, though not as trendy as if it was an iPhone

Phones are constant source of irritation in our family. Irritation is probably not the right word but they do constantly come up in conversation. Joe is always losing his. That’s after he spent about £80 of his own money on it. I found him bashing his iPod Touch one day because it wasn’t working properly. No wonder. Anne’s phone is always either out of battery or on silent because she’s been in church and forgot to switch it back afterwards. It is hugely frustrating just finishing a conversation with her and then rining her back because you forgot to mention something. But she has it on silent so doesn’t hear it ring!

I dunno, I really don’t. The ideal phone/gadget hasn’t been invented yet in my mind anyway.

What really annoys me about phones is when people ring you but withhold their numbers. That’s not the way to get me to answer the phone people!

I do like the idea of better Google on a phone. I’m a Google fan in case you haven’t already noticed. This isn’t a hard and fast thing but at the moment I can get pretty much most things I need from them.

It doesn’t do the cooking of course though I expect I could use it to find a takeaway. I like the idea of a webpage with my favourite takeaway order already stored so all I have to do is click “reorder”. Someone has probably already invented it and I just haven’t got around to finding it yet. That’s part of the problem with tinternet. It’s so huge. How do you know it is there. That perfect website. It’s like philospherontap.com. Not many people visit it. Only the few people I have told in person really but I can’t be bothered to go out and promote it. Have done now though ?

As I write this, sat at the kitchen table, the dishwasher is working behind me. It is quite relaxing, to the point that my shoulders have given a little shudder. You know the feeling? Not a bad shudder, a good shudder. I can’t tell you how many dishes are being washed. Too many probably. Anne likes to get her value for money out of a wash. Not even Google can help with that one although I could probably find some statistic on tinternet to tell me how many plates the average dishwasher has when fully loaded. Possibly.

Someone would find that interesting. They need to get a life. So do I really but if I keep writing long enough I’ll come up with the COMPLETE SET OF TINTERNET LAWS. That’s the way it happens. 1% inspiration 99% perspiration though sweat dripping onto my laptop wouldn’t do it any good. That saying clearly comes from the pre-internet days.

I did once knock a glass of water onto a laptop just before I was due to make a major presentation. Boy was there panic. One person tried to recover the hard drive to put into another laptop whilst I sat at a different computer re-typing the presentation just in case.

I don’t recall how the talk went. Good probably. That was years ago. This is now. Pointless regurgitation of things to say for the sake of it. Just like most meanderings on tinternet.

to be continued… 

 click here to go to THIRD LAW OF TINTERNET part 2

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