Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jun 26 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Out of the frying pan

We enjoyed a banging thunderstorm this morning! It happened rather handily during that period between waking up and doing the school run. There was one crack of thunder in particular that felt like it was right out of Hollywood! It followed a blinding strike of lightning, which is what you see in the picture above.

Some of the rain managed to find its way into the house after I’d earlier opened a few windows to let a brief non-Saharan breeze flow in. Then the power went out. There’s enough energy in a bolt of lightning to power a home for several months, yet ironically this bolt of lightning took our power away. It’s almost like the clouds are sucking the energy out of our home and redistributing it elsewhere. Typical clouds, coming over here, taking our energy.

Most of the energy tied up in our house is in our eight-year-old son. He’s like an undiscovered oil field in the North Sea, or one of those plasma globes that you put your hands on to make your hair stand on end. If any energy companies found out about him, we’d be in trouble. They’d be harvesting him like there’s no tomorrow, fracking his face off so their share price and profits would surge even more than they currently are in this energy crisis.

What normally happens after a few days of heat is that a thunderstorm rolls across, dumps a load of rain on us, then cleaner, cooler air follows behind it. Not today. What’s followed has been a slightly more intense and invasive heat, so everyone feels disgusting again. A whole nation’s productivity took a nosedive this week just because everyone was feeling irritable.

You’ve got to feel for Gosport, though. They recorded the highest ever temperature for June (36.1°C), a figure that’s stood for 50 years, and they only got to hold that trophy for 24 hours when Merryfield in Somerset took it from them (36.7°C). And then Santon Downham in Suffolk snatched it from them today (37.3°C). If they can just see out the next few days, the record will sit with them for at least a year. That’s the way to do it — storm in at the end, score a goal deep into injury time.

The only blot on my copybook today was using the phrase ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ twice on Zoom calls when talking about the heat. I’m better than that.

Tagged , , ,
Jun 23 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Melting

This sea turtle knew what was coming in the England v Ghana match tonight. My son has a way with facial expressions when it comes to art, and his art has a way of speaking about cultural events that are yet to occur, like a prophecy, or a Mystic Meg for the Among Us generation.

We forgot to force Reuben to predict the outcome of the match before kick-off. He’d say it’s unfair of us to ask him to do anything, ever, but it felt particularly unfair to ask him to walk from the living room the kitchen in this heat just to eat a few Dreamies off a pair of flash cards.

He later melted into the carpet once the trajectory of the match had become clear. My son once described Reuben as Ooblek, a non-Newtonian fluid suspension (Googled that) where he’s neither solid or liquid… but also both at the same time.

My parents left for Crete last week, yet it’s actually hotter right here in Leeds. Looks like the temperatures are going to hold out at 30°C for three consecutive days, which no one wants, really. I was on a Zoom call earlier where we decided 24°C was the optimum temperature for summer. If someone could grant us 24°C every day between June and September I think we’d all be very happy, and the country’s infrastructure wouldn’t have to buckle and everyone could get a comfortable night’s sleep.

We could start a campaign: ‘Adore 24’. It could become a movement, we could go down in history! Not sure who we’re campaigning to (or against), and it has ‘man shouts at cloud’ vibes about it. Might need to think this through.

My son waltzed home yesterday from school, grabbed a blanket, jumped on the couch, fired up Animal Crossing on his Switch, and turned the tower fan off. He feels neither the heat nor the cold. Then he made his character roam the island while saying ‘seize the means of production’ to his fellow islanders. I was well underprepared to have a conversation about Marxism last night. I just wanted to watch the England match.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
Jun 22 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Am Sco’tash!

The pry monster today ‘reclined, or something’, according to my son. He said the children in his class were celebrating this news because he’d banned under 16s from using social media. The policy is a bit more nuanced than that, but children don’t have time for nuance. They heard something, it became fact. Now, what can I have for pudding?

I think there are clear examples in very recent times of politicians who have successfully managed to connect with adults whose brains function like children — Kier Starmer not one of them, obviously.

I stayed up late on Friday night to watch Scotland’s second group match, which kicked off at 11pm, so my head didn’t touch the pillow until just after 1am. I know I should be going to bed earlier than this, but World Cups like this don’t come around very often, and you only live once, and I should’ve known the Scots wouldn’t have made it worth my while.

They conceded after 70 seconds, which was the fastest goal of the tournament at the time, before it was beaten in the very next match I believe, and that ended up being the only goal of the game.

I don’t have anything against the Scots, by the way. I love Irn Bru and shortbread, particularly Highland shortbread, because everyone knows it tastes better if it’s manufactured at high altitude. Can’t say I’ve ever tried a deep-fried Mars Bar, but in an effort to deep fry a piece of fruit at home I watched a mate of mine from school burn a banana with his dad’s cigarette lighter. The banana actually caught fire and he ended up throwing it over the neighbour’s fence in a panic.

By virtue of his great grandma on his mother’s side, our son is a sixteenth Scottish. I’m not very good at fractions or genealogy, but he’s also a thirty-second Swedish (I thought the word was ‘thirty-secondth’, but the internet tells me that’s not right, and I’m a fool for ever thinking it was. So I’m not very good at English, either).

Tagged
Jun 20 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Flags, inflatables and fifteen goals

Get your flags out for the lads! After my wife put them up, I foolishly opened the windows to let some air in (to be fair, it has been very warm recently) and one of the flags fluttered away. Like Reuben last night, who escaped out of the living room window, it didn’t get very far. Both flag and house cat are now back where they belong.

Reuben had had enough of our crap and stealthily sneaked out of the living room window we’d left ajar given the sultry conditions. He’s lucky I bothered to even look for him in the first place; I just happened to notice that he wasn’t in his regular spot when I came down from doing story time. I opened the front door, peered round the corner and there he was, sat looking into the long grass with an expression of incredulity having possibly seen the hedgehog that visits us each night walking round the place like he owns it (which he does).

It was absolute carnage this morning as our under-8s found themselves 6-0 down before they mounted a spirited comeback. Unfortunately, the damage was done early on, and so it’s possibly the only time I’ll use the word ‘respectable’ to describe a 9-6 defeat.

At one point I thought it was going to be telephone numbers, but after such a disastrous start our lads settled into it and kept chipping away at the deficit. I’d love to say it had something to do with my inspired team talks, but at each quarter break I was panicking trying to work out the logistics of giving each of our nine players an equal amount of game time, so I actually said very little to them.

I had flashbacks of our under-7 season when we got roundly trounced just about every week (once we lost 22-0). It did feel like it was going that way to begin with, but I like to look at this positively and say that, from the 13th minute onwards, we won today’s match 6-3. Let’s say the game was only the final 27 minutes, cos that’s the real quiz.

No one saw that result coming, not even Reuben (because I didn’t get him to predict it. Maybe I should’ve).

After taking our son play football in very humid conditions this morning, we then headed to Harewood House to take part in the annual inflatable 5k race. He fell asleep very quickly tonight!

Mercifully there was a breeze on a very warm day. Five kilometres is a remarkably long way when you haven’t properly exercised for years. Some of the inflatables that are dotted around the course are pretty easy to navigate, while others really sap the energy out of you. I’ve been carrying an injury to my left leg for the past three or four years and it hampered me more than it did when I previously ran the course.

Still, I got my medal! Another achievement to add to my CV.

Sweaty and achy, we fully deserved our evening meal at Miller & Carter, which my wife had thoughtfully booked in the week. It was a rare evening out for the three of us — which ended in the McDonald’s drive thru as we could get a McFlurry each for the same price as one dessert at the restaurant.

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 17 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Reuben for England!

He’s had his critics, but Reuben showed a lot of character tonight and stepped up to the plate (or the flash cards with Dreamies on them) and put in an excellent display of football predicting.

He came flying out of the traps early doors — so much so that he actually missed the treats altogether and walked right over them. But once he got his head in the game he was gobbling up the England treats first.

Well done, cat. As the last remaining knight of the templar said in that Indiana Jones movie, you chose… wisely. I’ve found that I say this quite a lot in my day-to-day life, where appropriate (obviously). I say it almost as much as Bob Peck’s ‘clever girl’ line in Jurassic Park, for when Daisy uses the litter tray instead of the area of floor just in front of it.

True, the consequence of Reuben getting not getting his prediction right wasn’t to age rapidly, turn into a nasty skeleton and then get kicked into the corner by Harrison Ford where he’d turn to dust and get blown away by a mysterious breeze, until only a Nazi pin badge remained. But still. You can’t take it away from him (whatever ‘it’ is).

Live TV is a dead duck. And who watches a dead duck? Not even its mother. It just flies off, depressed (there’s always room for a Partridge quote). One of the very few things I’ll watch live on TV is England matches. I can’t pause it and watch it on any sort of delay because Baxter’s dad — the guy who lives in the house opposite — is loud as hell. I always know when Leeds have scored, or missed a sitter, because of that sweary foghorn. Even watching the England game live tonight, he was somehow a second or two ahead of us, so he served as a slightly annoying early warning system until I thought to close the back door.

We don’t know actually know his name, by the way. All we know is that the dog is called Baxter, so he’s Baxter’s dad. I’d say that’s genetically improbable, but people like Coldplay and vote for Farage. You can’t trust people, Jeremy (Partridge and Peep Show? Only the best for my one reader!).

As for the England performance, it was very good. You could almost say it was exciting (which is ridiculous, really!). Scored four, could’ve had more. A little wobbly and uncertain in defence, but you can’t have everything. Reuben knows this. That’s why his cries for more Dreamies were in vain.

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 15 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Fart Verruca

We’re only four games in and I’ve somehow lost our FIFA World Cup 2026 wall chart. I hold myself to a higher standard than that. We didn’t even get past the group stage.

Anyway, more games have passed since the mysterious disappearance of the wall chart, and I must say it’s been an enjoyable tournament so far with plenty of goals. A lot of them came for Germany against Curaçao, but Spain managed none against Cape Verde.

As a nocturnal person who has never voluntarily gone to bed in his life, this tournament has the hallmarks of a classic. I can’t quite do the 2am kick-offs on a work night (I’m not an insomniac, yet) but I’ve been able to see through the 11pm kick-offs successfully.

My son was convinced, if only for a little while, that the Dutch goalkeeper’s name was Fart Verruca. I didn’t actually know his real name to put him straight, so I had to Google it and now I’m being served up ads for Bazuka gel wherever I go online.

To be fair to the lad, it did sound very much like Fart Verruca to me. The name Bart Verbruggen isn’t as much fun. He’ll be known as Fart Verruca by us from hereon in, just as the Welsh lower league striker Rob Duffy was known as Cob Dirty owing to the way his name was distorted on Soccer Saturday by our pathetic TV display (which, admittedly, we’d dropped on the floor when moving into the house a few weeks earlier).

One of the reasons I got the bug for attending football matches was the singing and chanting, perhaps more so than the football itself. I love the ingenuity and inventiveness of the fans, and it seems the England fans are being particularly inventive in the US — not that Trump will enjoy their creativity much.

My wife made me aware of a question that was posed online, asking: if you could eradicate two people from this world without any repercussions, who would your second choice be?

I’ll answer that by asking: what’s the difference between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars?

(The answer is about a trillion dollars.)

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 14 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Raise your glass!

We had another fabulous day on the beach collecting sea glass of colours that spanned the whole spectrum. It takes some imagination and guesswork at the time of picking them up because the vast majority you find are white (or clear) and green, so it’s much of a muchness.

Depending on how long the glass has been in the sea, you get these beautiful in-between colours, where green takes a yellow hue, and brown goes a bit orange. White (or clear) can go a bit blue, while red is the rarest of the lot. Did they ever make red glass back in the day?

Some are rounded while others still have edges, and some look polished while others are rough. The clarity varies too, and every now and again — if you’re lucky, like our son tends to be — you find a piece of glass that has two or even three colours in it, as if several pieces of glass were smashed together and fused by the sea.

There was a bottleworks in Seaham that closed down just over a hundred years ago, but while it operated it used to dump waste glass in the North Sea, so what washes up with each tide is a bit of history that looks rather magnificent when you line it up on a blank piece of white card.

Another great find of ours was the Bully pork scratchings in B&M Bargains. Super, smashing, great! You can’t beat a bit of Bully pork scratchings. Fair play to the brand and design team, they’ve got it all there on the packaging. When it comes to pork scratchings, you can’t mess around.

As a post-script to the weekend — since we were in the area (and since our son had already had his photo take outside of St James’ Park in Newcastle) — we decided to swing by the Stadium of Light in Sunderland and the Riverside in Middlesbrough on our way home as our mission to visit every football league ground makes a relatively mild start.

Tagged , , , ,
Jun 12 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Bucket (no spade)

After working the morning, I took the afternoon off to pack for a weekend away in Seaham. It was something we did a couple of years ago, and we loved sifting through the sand looking for sea glass on the sea shore (she sold all the sea shells, whoever she is, so sea glass is the new sea shells) and so we booked a return and stayed in the very same apartment as last time.

We’ve been getting our son into the spirit of the World Cup by teaching him some of the songs and anthems that get a good airing on Spotify at this moment in time, so he was confidently belting out ‘Me and me Mam and me Dad and me Gran, we’re off to Waterloo; me and me Mam and me Dad and me Gran, with a bucket of Vindaloo’ on the car journey there.

Bucket!

Proud moment. It nudged his score of 5/5 in his spelling test into second place in a list of his achievements today. It did make me wonder how unappetising it would be to use a bucket as a vessel for your curry, but it clearly wasn’t a concern for the Colonel as KFC have been selling chicken by the bucketload quite literally for years, possibly pre-dating Vindaloo — and maybe, just maybe, that’s where Fat Les got the idea from. I could absolutely believe Keith Allen would eat out of a bucket. Alex James and Damien Hirst, absolutely not.

We got some fish and chips from Downey’s — one of five fish and chip shops in and around the Sunderland area owned by a couple of brothers — and ate them out of a box. One of the brothers is called Glen and he spent 18 months a Grimsby Town player. He barely played in all that time but did come off the bench once, in an away game at Wrexham, and scored a winning goal. He never played again, so he became one of the club’s most enigmatic players. He’s since cracked on building his fish and chip empire in the North East. They’re pretty good, and as someone who grew up eating fish and chips every weekend I’d say I’m more qualified than Grace Dent to say whether a chippy is good or not.

We spent the early evening getting our eye in for spotting the little nuggets of glass that sparkle among the pebbles. It’s a fascinating beach and we could’ve spent longer there, but with the temperature dropping and tide encroaching we decided to call it a day and headed back to the apartment where we watched those crazy Canadians snatch a draw against Bosnia.

Tagged , , , , , ,
Jun 11 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

Kingsby Town FC

I work with a Mexican and I’m married to a South African, so as far as world cup openers go today’s grabbed my attention a little more than usual. Shame I was on another late-running and overcrowded LNER service to witness any of the three red cards (and two goals).

Really hope the referee didn’t feel like he had to officiate in the style of Trump to appease that grotesque buffoon so that he wouldn’t get deported. I’m not even sure if I’m being flippant there.

As most people know, the real story of the day wasn’t in Mexico. Sure, the King can hold court on a sunny day at Buckingham Palace, but can he do it on a cold, wet Thursday afternoon in Grimsby? Turns out he can!

There are some things I thought I’d never see — the King receiving a Grimsby Town shirt from the club’s foam-headed mascot the Mighty Mariner being one of them. Imagine being the person inside that costume on the day you met the king. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and you had to do it wearing a frankly ridiculous costume. It’d be pretty hard to prove it was you in there when your sceptical grandchildren question you later in life, too.

Perhaps the club would’ve been better off getting an actual mariner, a mighty and revered one, like Captain Birdseye. He can’t be up to much these days, surely. He must be a Grimsby fan (I’ve heard nothing to suggest he isn’t).

It was a long day on set at a TV shoot in London today. Missed the celebrity and watched the body double do some takes instead (it’s a good job I’m not a glory hunter). The studio was massive, I ate too much, then I got drenched walking back to the tube station. This trip has been bookended with drenchings.

I found myself sat next to a a wizened old woman on the train back. At one point I thought she’d whipped out a pack of tarot cards, but it was just a little packet of tissues. I’m not sure I want to know my future, in any case. If something amazing was going to happen, it wouldn’t be as much fun if I knew it was coming.

Tagged , , ,
Jun 10 2026
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

London train trays

The poor guy next to me on the train down to King’s Cross this afternoon was tormented by the drop-down tray in front of him. There wasn’t a latch to keep it up against the seat in front, so about a minute after he’d pop it back up it would fall down again and rap his knees.

In the end he left it down, but he was a tall man and his knees were considerably higher than mine. Having been ground down by the tray, his soul crushed (as well as his knees), the man’s only option was to sleep. The tray couldn’t hurt him in his dreams.

In the moment, you don’t really think of solutions (because there was one, and it was a fairly simple one at that, of me offering to swap places as my knees were safely below the tray line).

But I was still getting over an injustice of my own earlier when the heavens opened and I got drenched by rain and hail (it’s June!) on my short walk to the station. It literally began raining when I locked the door behind me and stopped when I stepped onto the train. As we rolled out of the station, the sun climbed out from behind a big black cloud, which just melted away, and blazed down as if the rain had never happened.

When things happen so precisely like that, it does make you wonder if there’s a higher power at work. You’d think this higher power would rather torment political psychopaths than wind me up, but maybe I’ve underestimated how important I am. Or maybe the political psychopaths have somehow nobbled the higher power, which would be just typical of them.

I also lost the rubber bit on one of my ear buds on the train, so I had to listen to other people’s phone conversations instead of my music. I don’t like to take phone calls on busy trains, but others appear to relish it. One man boasted of eating a banana just before bed and still sleeping like a log, another ‘accidentally’ electrocuted a horse.

What am I doing with my life?

← Older posts
Newer posts →