Shifting, slashing, getting nowhere

My absence this time can be explained by an almost crippling bout of indecision. Firstly with the comic; I have, somewhat joyously, almost finished story two but despite having weeks to think about it I still haven’t decided what to do for story three. How I wish I had a brain that could provide me with ideas! It would be so useful. Secondly, I’m not happy with this blog. I set it up to complement the comic as a means of sharing news, sketches, teasers and so on. I wandered from this brief immediately and have been getting further away ever since. The scenery was nice but now I’m just lost. As it’s no longer relevant to the comic I’ve been thinking about either renaming it, starting another blog from scratch or just scrapping it altogether. Again, indecision reigns. Coin tossing has not been ruled out as a means of breaking the deadlock. I guess you’ll find out soon enough.

In unrelated news, I’m writing this on a brand new laptop that I purchased at the weekend. Like most things I buy I didn’t really need it, but it’s shiny and has nice blue lights. I am blogging in bed! My only gripe is that the right shift key is the same size as the letter keys. I know, it’s awful. I’m used to a nice, wide, forgiving shift key on my main computer and the result is that I keep missing this one and hitting the ‘/’ key instead. Sigh. At least it should train my pinkie to probe more accurately and you never know, that might come in useful one day.

Well my battery is about to run out which is as good an excuse as any to stop prattling on.

Jacqueline

For reasons that aren’t interesting, I have had to move my fortnight’s summer holiday forward to the end of this month. That means I have just three weeks and two days to go! Of course when I say summer holiday, I don’t mean in the ‘going away’ sense. I don’t do those. I mean two weeks to myself at home, which in my view is far better. Going abroad has never appealed to me. I’m sure the world is a wonderful place to explore, but for now I’m quite happy in England. I’ve visited Wales, Switzerland and France and that’s quite enough for now. I’m the only person I know who loves the English weather. If someone handed me free flights and accommodation to a warm European resort, I’d pass it on. Not interested. Instead I shall be spending my break trying to regain some of the ground I’ve lost on the comic in recent weeks, which will hopefully enable me to make it through to my next break at Christmas. I’m a simple man with modest needs. Every girl’s dream.

The comic has, however, left me with a dilemma regarding this summer’s television viewing. My commitment to producing three strips per week means that I will probably have to forego Big Brother this year, and possibly also the European Championships. England’s absence from the latter will make it easier, but three weeks of wall to wall football is a rare treat that will be hard to pass up. I may just cherry pick the best looking games and bite the bullet with the rest.

In other news, I am currently in a great deal of discomfort following the sudden onset of lower back pain. Normally with such a thing you’d have a foolish lifting incident to look back on regretfully, an origin on which to expend your anger and annoyance. This time though, I have no idea what I’ve done to solicit such distress. Is my bad posture catching up with me? Was that jar of jalfrezi sauce heavier than it looked? Am I just getting old? I bought a tube of ibuprofen gel to work its magic but I might as well have rubbed Fairy Liquid into my upper arse cheeks. Might try that as well just in case.

Season two of Heroes is rubbish

I’ve given it six episodes to win me over but I have to conclude that season two of Heroes is awful. I always wondered how they could follow up the first season – which always felt like it should be a one-off – and the answer is that they couldn’t. When the show first started, only a handful of the characters had special abilities and it seemed, in a totally fantastical way, quite plausible. Then slowly more and more characters found that they had powers and now you’d be hard pushed to find anyone without them. It’s lazy plotting if you ask me, and as the king of lazy hole-ridden plots I should know. Yes, even I could have written it. And in what way are these people Heroes? They mostly use their powers to show off or kill people. Even the arrival of the lovely Kristen Bell hasn’t saved it. This is to say nothing of the tiresome storyline involving Hiro in 17th century Japan. What’s the point of it? It’s as if the writers couldn’t figure out how to involve him and so decided to slap him in a scenario that had no relevance to the rest of the show. Well to be fair there are still a few episodes remaining and they might tie it all together neatly in the end but they’ll be lucky if I make it that far. Then there’s the brother and sister combo – she kills people with her bleeding eyes routine, he brings them back to life. How convenient! It really wouldn’t surprise me if someone appeared who can sharpen pencils by sticking them up his arse. The only saving grace is that the season has been curtailed to just eleven episodes because of the writer’s strike. My guess is that the strike kicked in before they’d even started and so they left it to the work experience lad to ‘do his best’. Axe it now!

Let the Monkey Drive

I was waiting for something ‘worthwhile’ to blog about because I had clearly forgotten who I am. Apologies for that. So, in the continued absence of any such material, here is my review of the latest Sparks album Exotic Creatures of the Deep using only words that begin with the letter ‘B’.

Bold, belligerent beats building brilliantly – bewildering, befuddling, brave. Broadly baffling. Brothers bond, bleating beneficially, bartering bonhomie (bosom buddies). Brains, brawn, bravado. Barely bleak, basically blithe. Blindly blusterous. Buzzing, brimming bundle. Bravo! Buy.

Also this weekend I stumbled upon an episode of ‘Beauty and the Geek’ on Channel 4 and remembered how much I love it. Surely the best reality TV show ever? Unlike other shows in that bracket, it has a genuine point and isn’t just about egos. I particularly love the captions that are used when the contestants are interviewed; one of the geeks will be explaining something to the camera and underneath will appear: "Josh – Still a virgin" or "Craig – Has only kissed one girl". The American version is in its fifth season now, but for reasons I can’t fathom the UK version was dropped after just one series. If you missed it, here’s a quick teaser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsZIVwLxfe8

Great entertainment. I wish I could relate to the sad, bedroom dwelling, socially inept geeks a little bit more but you can't have everything.

And that is all that a week's hiatus from blogging has offered up.  Well, there was a raging debate between my frugal and profligate selves about the quality to value ratio of choosing Sainsbury's own brand jalfrezi cooking sauce over Sharwoods... but that really isn't worth mentioning.

Walletgate: the resolution

Okay, okay, OKAY.  My conscience has been pricked regarding the wallet and its contents.  My final decision is this:

• The wallet and all its cards will be sent anonymously to the owner's workplace, the name of which was on the Makro cash and carry card.  The book of stamps will be used to cover the postage.
  
• The £120 has been donated in the owner's name to the charity that Ariane suggested the other day.  Proof here.  A note will be placed in the wallet to advise Mr Nunn of his good deed.

And, in the words of McAlmont and Butler: Yes, I do feel better.

Finders keepers?

Yesterday, dear reader, I was faced with a moral quandary that has tested my position as an upstanding pillar of society. I had just finished a long day at work, and having locked up the premises I hopped into my truck for what I expected to be a familiar and uneventful drive home. As I accelerated away, however, I noticed a small black object lying in the road. Initially I dismissed it – it was probably a child’s shoe or something similar – but my curiosity was sufficiently roused for me to do a U turn at the roundabout to return and take a look. Slowing down I could see that it was, in fact, a wallet. I hopped out, slipped it in my pocket and continued to drive home without looking at it further. Back at my flat I examined the contents and found the following:

• Six £20 notes
• Two debit cards
• Nine first class stamps (current value £3.24)
• A Jersey £1 note
• A Homebase ‘Spend and Save’ card along with voucher worth £4.00
• Four (four!) RAC membership cards
• A Boots Advantage card
• A Makro card
• A Nectar card
• A Shell driver’s club card
• A Matalan reward card (classy)
• A BT chargecard (relic from the pre-mobile age?)
• An international phone card with ‘Ghana’ written on the front
• A business card for a Premier Inn
• A Morrison Miles card (presumably for petrol purchases?)
• A voucher for a free cool bag from Wyevale Garden Centres
• A Co-op dividend card (a department store – not sure if it exists outside East Anglia)
• A couple of old receipts
  

Despite all these pieces of identification, there was no hint of an address or telephone number. If this man expects to get his wallet back, he hasn’t made it easy. As I see it, I have the following options:

1. Keep everything of value and throw the rest away, since he’s bound to have cancelled the debit cards already
2. Hand everything over to the police and hope that it remains unclaimed for long enough to get it back again
3. Keep the money and hand everything else over to the police, pretending that it was empty when I found it
4. Try to track the guy down myself and return the wallet anonymously minus the money
5. Try to track the guy down myself and return the wallet and the money in the hope of a reward from the grateful owner and a warm glow from being a good citizen
   

Before you help me decide, there are some other factors to consider. Firstly, the guy’s name is Mr C Nunn. That’s right, he’s just one pen stroke away from being me. We could be distantly related. Surely he would want me to have the money and do our clan proud. Secondly, I have had to take unpaid time off work recently because of my refrigeration problems. This is no fault of my own. To find this wallet – which contains not only sufficient funds to remunerate my lost earnings but also the symbolic voucher for a free cool bag – can mean just one thing: that I have been singled out not by chance but by the providence of a just and sympathetic universe. Thirdly, on a less positive note, I found the wallet directly outside the local police station. My workplace is next door to it. It’s possible that someone inside saw me pick up the wallet without realising what I was doing, and they might have even recognised me or my truck. If my namesake realises where he dropped it and reports it missing, they might put two and two together and come and find me, blowing me away in a hail of machine gun fire before I can beg for forgiveness (Suffolk Police are mean mo-fos). We must concede, however, that this is quite unlikely.

So what would you do? If I lost my wallet, I would of course be eternally grateful to anyone who was honest enough to return it. But I honestly wouldn't expect them to. I would regard it as one of life’s hard but firm lessons in taking better care of my valuables. If I reunite Mr C Nunn with his wallet he’ll never learn that lesson and could find himself mislaying animals, children or small nuclear devices further down the line. Lives could be jeopardised all because I failed to take the hard line. It is surely, therefore, my solemn duty to bite the bullet and have a good ol’ spending spree.

One further possibility that has only just occurred to me is that the wallet was planted there (in close proximity to the police station to allow ample opportunity to do the right thing), as part of a new ITV hidden camera show called ‘Britain’s Most Selfish Bastards’. I’ll be there in a high-def freeze frame as the word BASTARD is stamped across my face to a chorus of audience boos, instantly condemning me to a life of notoriety as a local ne'er do well.

It’s so hard to be good these days.

Saving

My computer at home is less than a year old, well built and mostly willing to do as it’s told. We get on fine and I even overlook the buzzing noise it occasionally emits because I’m a reasonable man with a long fuse. Nobody’s perfect, after all. But the other night, without warning, a message appeared saying that Windows was going to shut down as it had encountered a problem. It was like a teenage strop – completely out of the blue, no explanation, and I didn’t have time to save my work. I’d nearly finished colouring ‘Self Assembly’ and lost an hour of my efforts. My initial annoyance then turned to concern, worry and panic as the machine would not restart. ‘No boot device located’. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me and as before, I started to mentally list all the important files that I may have lost forever, grimacing with increasing anguish at each one. Experience told me not to panic though, so I removed the hard drive and gently caressed its casing, pleading to its tiny silicon heart to give me one more chance.

I won’t drag this tiresome anecdote out – it worked. The computer rebooted and I continued on my merry way, although I haven’t used it since and I’m still anxious as to whether long term failure is around the corner. My somewhat laboured point is that if you’re not in the habit of backing up your work on a regular basis, you really should. Even new-ish drives can fail without warning. An online vault is the safest method and one that until now I hadn’t really considered. Think on’t.

Meanwhile, in my ever fascinating fridge saga, the replacement model is being delivered tomorrow within the absurdly vague timeframe of 7am – 6pm. In my job I have to book appointments with people all the time, and if I started quoting 11 hour windows I’d have been shot by an irate customer before now. Is that really the best they can do? It won’t be long before they just give you a ‘week commencing’ delivery date and take the phone off the hook. More unpaid time off. One surprising bonus, however, is that the replacement model they are sending is worth £600 – twice the value of the old one – so what I’m losing in paid employment I’m gaining in fridge equity (and when the housing market finally implodes and we’re all wading through the detritus of our financial ruin, fridge equity could be crucial). So on balance, I’m happy.

Doormouse Nitpick #2

As threatened, here is the second Doormouse Nitpick strip.

Apologies if you have a slow connection - I couldn't reasonably make the file any smaller.

A post-card from the West Country

My weekend in Bristol was most enjoyable. We went karting in the afternoon, which was fine until the brake cable snapped on my kart and I spun out. Then I bumped Thom off the track without even noticing, gave one of his mates whiplash in the pit lane because I couldn’t stop and generally made a nuisance of myself (there’s probably a memo being circulated around all the karting tracks in Britain right now warning them about a lanky, chaos causing half-wit). After watching a recording of the cup final we all went out and had a very subdued evening playing dominoes and comparing gardening tips, as is traditional on stag weekends.

A chilling update

As concerned and curious readers, I’m sure you’re all wondering what happened to my broken refrigerator. Well, appliance fans, the repair man came yesterday and worked his frosty mojo. The fridge is now working again! Just as the weather turns cold. Anyway, in an exciting twist, it was under guarantee after all because I’d registered online. This is fortunate because the cause of the problem is a reoccurring manufacturing defect and so they are going to replace the whole appliance free of charge. With drama like this, who needs EastEnders?

I’m away in Bristol this weekend for a mate’s stag do. I hate driving so much that I’m tempted to charter a jet, but I’ve probably left it too late now.