Eurgh - you might not want to read this

Yesterday my builder talked to me about how difficult it is for them to do the plastering while the old toilet's still in place - could I do without it? I said that might be difficult. What would happen if I had diarrhoea at the weekend for example. We agreed that the pan could stay in place but the cistern could go, so I can flush it with a bowl of water. Guess what happened last night/this morning?

Got home last night about 7:30 feeling incredibly tired. Took one bite of reheated steak & kidney casserole and threw up exuberantly. Early to bed, feeling incredibly cold, and kind of watched The Restaurant. (How surprising was that result, by the way.) Spent all night hardly sleeping with a feeling of bad things happening in my bowels. At 6 woke up to fulfill the prophecy. If I didn't have the builders in, I'd certainly have taken the day off, but I'm at work, hungry but scared to eat, and with little faith in Imodiom Instants - how can something so small be any good?

Had a flu jab yesterday - could that be the cause?

Please, Dawkins, let this end soon!

Out!

Can't believe I wrote a post about an ironing board, but it's just that I'm getting addicted to throwing out old crap. Here's what's gone in the last two months:

a spin dryer (at least 20 years old and unused for quite some time) (do they still make them?)
an old laser printer
a defunct laptop
a vhs video recorder (I'd dumped the tapes at least a year ago)
a garden chair
a stock of cassette tapes
a turntable and a stock of lps, various
an ironing board
various will-never-fit-me-again clothes
a bathroom and its contents
a black ash (remember black ash?) occasional table

and there's still more to go.

Limping behind technology's advances

Taking advantage of every suburbanite's dream, a skip of my own, I've thrown out all my cassette tapes, with regret for the unreplaceable ones - the radio recordings, the mixtapes by or for friends, and the tape I made one night of the sound of rain falling on Catford. Actually, that's entirely replaceable.

And today, I bought a new ironing board. Who would have thought ironing board technology would have advanced so much in 30 years? The new one has an automatic rachety height setting and hitech silicone pads to hold the iron. Fascinating.

Charlton 1 Burnley 1

That was better, eventually. A poor start, going behind to a soft goal after 13 minutes - a drive that slipped through everyone in a crowded penalty area. Everyone then waited for the spirit to fail and the technique to vanish - but it didn't happen. The second half saw some inspired substitutions: Todorov and Sam on for Primus and Macleod meant that Cranie could go into the centre of defence, where he looked much more comfortable, and Basey took over at left back. It wasn't perfect, but the confidence grew and the goal - a header from Todorov from a Basey freekick - was pretty much deserved. Late in the game Varney should have scored but tried to dribble the ball around the keeper rather than just lash it in. Lack of confidence, obviously, but a win would have been more than we deserved. At last, the team had showed some resilience, and maybe it's a turning point.

Much more interesting than that was the presence of a god in human form just a few seats along from me: the legendary Derek Hales!

A collapsing house

Well not quite. I've been putting off for years getting my bathroom (a ground floor single storey extension) renovated, and now I know why. The plaster was shot, so had to come off, but that revealed serious cracks in the brickwork and some dodgy joisting in the roof. So it's now a matter of tieing the wall together and putting on a proper render to hold it all together. If that sounds expensive, it is. I tell myself it'll all be worth it in the long run. I'll never be out of the tub.

It begins

So, what's it like to take voluntary redundancy at the age of 55, with a liveable but unluxurious pension, limited prospects and very limited wishes for more full time employment? Join me, as I find out.