My wife's got no nose...

...actually she has, but at the moment its just like Gary Megson - not working. Yep she's been struck down with a combination of cold/flu/tonsils/plague and is currently sleeping at 9.58am. Some might call that lazy, but when you bear in mind she didn't sleep from 11pm last night until 9.01am this morning, you can let her off. Just as long as my lunch is on the table that is.

Being sick is rotten isn't it? It makes everything just that little bit harder and disorganised. We have bins rammed full of tissues, half drunk glasses of water and more drugs than an Irvine Welsh novel knocking round the house. Simple things like breathing and swallowing become some painful that rather than be aware of the broken glass like sensation you try to do neither. Which is fine for about 9 seconds but then you have to give in and it's just worse.

And the medicines? When I was young if I was sick I had disprin. That was it. Now, there are (I'm not joking, I counted) around 3.4 billion types of generic painkiller on the shelves just in the supermarket. You need a flow chart to choose? Do you have headache? Is it during the night? Do you want to be able to levitate? If yes, you need Asprimol45 with added Caramac and Vitamin Pro-K.

Also, never ever read the information leaflet inside the box. Lord no. Typical information inside ibuprofen packet "this product may cause dizziness, bleeding, drowsiness, stomach ulcers, a fondness for jazz, a stammer, earache, the inability to open doors and headaches." I love the last bit - I've got a headache, but this might cause a headache? You might as well punch yourself in the face.

Oh, and the expensive painkillers. Yes, I'm looking at you Nurofen Ultra or whatever you're called. "Double the strength - only one tablet required." Yes, at triple the price. Alternatively I could just take two of the normal ones couldn't I? And stop pretending that 'liquitab' is a word thats a lot of 'utterballs'.

The coughing noise from upstairs tells me she's waking up, so I'm off to play Florence Nightingale - by which I mean I'm going to revolutionise modern medicine through my work with the injured soldiers of the Crimean war.

Happy new year.

When I grow up, I want to be a real blogger

I haven't been here for a while, yes I know. And there's been a reason. Sorry. I shouldn't have treated you this way.

Saying that, if this is your first time here, and you've come via the scifiuk site, then welcome. Take off your clothes and have a seat.


Anyway, back to the regular dozen of you, I should explain myself. I feel like a guilty dog being found in a roomful of broken beanbags. Anyway, the reason I started this blog was because I wanted to write and get some of these mad thoughts out of my head. And I've done a lot of that.

So I sent some off my entries off to a publisher at the sci-fi uk site (the official site of the UK sci-fi channel) who rather nicely asked me to blog for their site too. So that's what I've been working on, getting myself set up on sci-fi uk and coming up with some ideas.

Frankly, I'm chuffed and excited, as sci-fi is on my list of wonderful things that include my wife, cats and cheese on toast.

Check out my blog page on the sci-fi site here - kicking off with a love of Flash Gordon.

So where do we go from here? Is this the end? Nah. It just means I'll be splitting my time between blogging for that site with sci-fi stuff and putting my usual nonsense about sherbert or monkeys on here.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me. And again, if you're here for the first time feel free to browse. Although all breakages must be paid for.

About babies

(a) don't worry, I'm not going to get all naughty
(b) no, we're not having a baby

so, for the two of you now left, babies. I don't know how to say this, but I'm having difficulty with babies. By that, I mean I don't know how to react when people show me pictures of them.

I know that the polite side of me wants to say "how lovely, what a smasher, oh doesn't he/she look like you" and in many circumstances I can say that. But the issue is this.

Some babies just look weird. I'm not being nasty, i'm just being truthful.

That's where my honesty wants to kick in. I don't mean recoiling in terror yelling "THE HORROR, THE HORROR", that would be too much. I've started to say "nice baby, 6 out of 10" or "That's the third best looking baby I've seen this year". But people seem to react negatively to this. (Oh, and really don't go for 'Have you seen Rosemary's Baby?' that really freaks parents out.)

I mean, the baby can't understand, so can't be offended - and in a way I'm surely encouraging the parents to help the child. A bit like giving feedback on a geography fieldwork project, giving a few pointers, maybe a hat or something. Or a blaclava.

No, of course I would never say these things. We've established just how nice I am. But one of these days I'm going to say something I shouldn't and probably get chased out of someones house.

Or at least banned from The Early Learning Centre.

Ignorance is bliss

I've never considered myself that special when it comes to brains. Yes, I know a lot of useless trivia that helps when playing quiz machines, I can successfully put flatpacked furniture together and I reckon I could at least chin three of the eggheads - but none of those things really make you Einstein material.

Then someone invited me to do an online IQ test and I got a shock. I scored something that marks me around "Highly gifted intelligence to genius." I was a little perturbed. So I did the 'advanced' version to see if was wrong. It was wrong. Apparantly my IQ was actually higher, making me a fully fledged genius.

Whilst these are silly online tests, with no probably basis in scientific fact, just a product of the internet. Except it's bugging me. Now I don't know what to do and I'm faced with a number of options. I could do nothing, have the intelligence to ignore the silly thing and forget all about it. Or I could try and find out if it's real. Or I could sit here smugly claiming I am the best whilst people curse at me on their computers.

So I sent off for a Mensa test. It took about half an hour. Lots of word games/picture puzzles, no 'pin the tail on Sir Clive Sinclair' but quite enjoyable. I finished it and sent it off.

Anyway, I got a letter back that scored me again in the same bracket and asked me to come for a formal test - admittedly costing £20 - but just to verify.

And now I worry, what if I am a genius? Shouldn't that mean I have a bigger role in the world to play. I don't understand medecine, technology, engineering etc so I don't think that I can play that big a role in the world. Surely I should now be inventing things, wind up robots, hover cats, anti-aging trousers?

Will knowing make me feel worse, or will it spur me on to try and do something bigger, something that makes a real difference. Will I have to give up all the silly things that I love to do that probably waste a lot of my time and devote myself like a monk to a higher ideal.

I really don't know.

King of the road

When i first met wife she told me she liked travel, eating out and expensive shopping trips. So I took her to some motorway services.

Of course not. That's clearly a joke.

But it does sum up the basic consituents of the motorway service station. For some of you, they may be something you see once or twice a year, but for me - a Devonian married to a Scot, and living in Yorkshire - motorway services become a part of many many trips around the country.

I've developed a real snobbery to them. There are ones I will actively seek out (Oxford Services on the M40, 3 good eateries and a Waitrose) and others I will avoid (Leicester Forest on the M1, the toilets are always like the ones at Glastonbury on the 4th day of the festival).

I know they are expensive, I know they are purely designed to suck your money but walking round the farm shop at Westmorland in Cumbria (the only independent services in the UK) or marvelling at the 1960s derelict tower North of Preston makes me oddly patriotic to these places. They're almost mini-worlds, the places you imagine the country would like after a nuclear war, a post-apocalyptic Ginsters paradise with fruit machines.

My fave story involving Frankley services (Southbound, top of the M5) was the time I drove a convertible car on a sunny day. I needed suntan lotion, else my massive head would burn in the sun, but nowhere stocked it on the motorway, and they didn't have baseball caps.

So I ended up buying a Burger King breakfast just so I could get something free to shade my head with.

Yes, it was a Burger King crown and I had to take it off after 5 minutes for fear of the police stopping me. "Is everything alright sir?" "I think you'll find, officer, that should be 'Is everything alright, your highness'"

I'm off to Glasgow tomorrow and (well obviously) I'll be taking M62 (past Birch), onto the M61 (Bolton) and then onto the M6 (too many to name). Some of the stops will be akin to dropping in at a friends house, admittedly one where they insist I pay for everything I want to do - and others will be passed by with nothing but the middle finger shown to them.

Jack Kerouac, eat your heart out.