Tablets, smut, molluscs and moles.

It's been a while. I need to vent some spleen.
It's not the big things that will do for me - I've coped quite well with all the usual crises that we are told are dangerous for your stress levels: births, deaths, house moves, job changes, relationship breakups, car crashes, redundancy and the like - but the little things, the low-level daily unpleasantness and irritations, they are the events that are going to tip me over the edge. Instead of dealing with them calmly and rationally, I do nothing, and allow a corrosive bitterness to well up inside me, that finally vents in a moment of pure, blind rage over something innocuous. Be warned.
Recently, events that have contributed to my inner well of bile are:

The incorrect selling of hayfever tablets: In the UK, there is a limit on the amount of medicine you can buy at once, in an attempt to prevent people from killing themselves with fistfuls of pills. This is one of those well-meaning laws that are steeped in good intentions but in fact just cause irritation - as the legal limit only applies on a 'per transaction' basis, it essentially serves no practical purpose: would-be suicides can easily get all the paracetamol they need by simply queueing up again (which is a depressing enough process to have to do once, so I can't imagine that being forced to do it multiple times does anything other than underline their decision).
However, rules are rules, and I understand that. I also understand that, should I inadvertently have more then the legal limit of hayfever tablets in my shopping basket (let's say, ooh, three packets, instead of two) then the store is quite right to remind me of the law in this matter and refuse to sell me the extra packet. Perfectly reasonable. I can perhaps do without the patronising little lecture at the checkout, but OK.
However, if that same store is actually deliberately selling hayfever tablets on a 'three for the price of two' deal , thus encouraging members of the public to put three packets of tablets in their basket in the first place, that is not reasonable. That is both stupid and annoying, as I explained at some volume at the time. I am not suicidal, I am thrifty - and it's not my mental faculties you should be worrying about, you shambling pack of halfwits.
What annoys me most is the fact that I clearly let myself down a bit in the end. If I am honest, telling some poor misbegotten checkout girl on minimum wage that she should "fire your entire marketing department" is highly unlikely to affect any kind of change, and just makes me look like a pillock.

Read the full post >>>

Simple rules for happy bedtimes.

I'm an easy-going kind of guy. You can tell that, right?
I like to think that in each and every one of these poisonous rants I make about my nearest and dearest and the wider world in general, you still get a sense of my general good-nature and tolerance. I hope that despite the bitterness and bile running through each of my posts, they still sparkle with a sense of fun. You've no doubt built a picture of me in your head: venting pure venom onto the Internet, sure - but in real life chuckling all the time, smiling at kittens, giving flowers to orphans, etc, etc. The very model of kind-hearted, fair-minded reason.
And of course, that picture of me is (barring one or two tiny inaccuracies that aren't worth dwelling on) entirely correct. Well done, you. Clever reader.

With that picture in mind, it will no doubt be a mystery to you (as it is to me) why my wife is so damn unreasonable about the few silly, minor little requests I make of her when we share a bed. Let me list them for you:

1) No socks in bed. Look, let's face it: nobody looks good wearing socks in bed. Not Cindy Crawford, not Jennifer Aniston*, and not you. Not even me, and I have the body of a Greek God**. Socks collect fluff and sweat and grubbiness and do not in any way set the mood. Also, when you wear socks in bed, you have a tendency to touch my leg with your foot, and the sensation is not unlike being rubbed with a dead snake***.

2) No complaining about the ledge. To combat the fact that sometimes it is so cold that you really do need to wear socks in bed, I have developed the (Patent Pending) 'ledge' method of warming the feet, whereby the bottom 6 inches of the duvet are curled under the rest of the bedclothes, forming a handy envelope or 'ledge' of toasty double-thickness duvet goodness that will thaw even the most frozen of extremities. It is very clear to me that this method of bedtime footwarming represents the future, and as a result I do not want to hear any petty complaints about your neck being cold because the duvet is now 6 inches shorter than it should be, or that I thrash around dementedly at night destroying the ledge in the process, or that the ledge is in fact 'a bit shit'. The ledge has worked well enough for me for some 35 years, and it's not my fault you have a circulatory system so lazy that it can't be bothered to pump blood down to your feet.

3) I will not budge on the 'no socks in bed' rule. Putting your icy cold feet on the small of my back and crying 'corpse footprint' when I am trying to sleep will not do anything except harden my resolve. Also, despite your long-held belief to the contrary, it is not funny.

4) It is not your duvet. It is jointly owned, and should be shared. The basic, long-established way of sharing a duvet is to both lie underneath it, with an equal share going to both parties. Granted, duvets do not tend to come with illustrated 'instructions for use', but if they did, I can assure you they would not show a picture of one person making furtive 'bicycling' movements until the entire thing had collected around their legs in a big mound, like some kind of pyjama-clad dung beetle.
It's a King-size duvet on a standard size bed, I only really need a third of it - so if you could find it in yourself to share at least that much of it with me, it would drastically reduce the risk of me dying of hypothermia in the night. Since our children do their best to ensure I don't actually sleep, having the goal of 'not freezing to death' while in my own bed seems very little to ask...

5) The stripy pillow is my pillow. Look, you already took the whole damn duvet - how many times to have to tell you, the stripy pillow is mine? Stop taking it. And stop trying to tell me that I 'got confused about this years ago and have always been wrong about this' and that it's in fact yours. And when you have inevitably stolen it, and I have somehow managed to fall asleep despite the crick in my neck, stop waking me up to give it back when you mysteriously find it is 'too lumpy for your head'.

6) Whatever I say/do in my sleep is beyond my control and nothing I should be held accountable for. Activities that fall into this category include, but are not limited to: fidgeting, snoring, belching, breaking wind or weeping quietly at the unfairness of it all.

7) I do not want to hear about your dreams. My dreams are those of a broken man. The most recent that I can recall with any clarity consisted of me running, terrified, through a surging stream, trying to carry each of our hysterical children in my arms, while a menacing horse with the face of lion stalked us from the riverbank, shouting "I'm going to eat you, little chickens". I awoke, somehow drenched in sweat despite the mysterious disappearance of all my bedclothes during the night, in a state of primal panic.
That was the point at which you thought you would share your own dream with me, in which you and Gary Barlow, lead singer of Take That, opened a bakery together - and subsequently became famous because you could 'bake pies that contained any filling in the world', including intangible things like 'music' or 'hope'.
I don't want to hear about that. Nobody wants to hear about that. It's just twisted.

* Doubtless there exists, somewhere on the Internet, a series of images that will cause me to question this long-held belief, but I am typing this on a family computer and Google Safe Search will be staying on.
**More specifically, that of Bacchus/Dionysus, god of wine, beer-bellies and the overactive production of nighttime flatus.
*** Yes, as a matter of fact I have been rubbed with a dead snake, so am speaking from a position of authority.

Driving, and why it sucks.

Well now, this is a problem: the kids have been good this week, and Nini and I have not really had any amusing exchanges or discussions worth reporting. In fact, the week has been perfectly pleasant, which leaves me with a dilemma: what the hell do I write about? Perhaps I can take this opportunity to vent a little spleen...

My car has now clocked up 146,336 miles. This may not seem it, but it is a significant number: I first got the car secondhand when it was 'nearly new', but at 46,336 miles I drove over a raised lump in the road at speed (while trying to get to the airport on time) and knocked the sump clean off, which seized the engine - which meant I needed an entirely new engine block. And so this week, at 146,336 miles, the car (in its current form) and I have driven 100,000 miles together. In car years, that's like making it to your golden wedding anniversary, though I will own up and say we have not been entirely faithful to each other in that time: I confess that I driven other cars while we've been together, and I know that 'Mrs. Focus' has had other drivers inside her (so to speak).
We marked the occasion in appropriate style: we were sitting in a traffic jam averaging 2 miles an hour as we hit the big 'one-four-six -double-three-six' and as a special anniversary gift, the valve on the rear nearside tyre failed and let almost all of the air out, making the car dangerously unstable at anything over 20 mph and necessitating an emergency trip to the garage. Sigh.
By God, but I am slowly coming around to hating driving. Let me tell you why:

It's dangerous: Let's not even speak about the number of wrecked cars I've seen at the side of the road: they are depressingly numerous and if a week goes by without me having to drive past a nasty looking pile-up on the hard shoulder it will be a minor record. In my time driving I have not only been in 3 accidents as a passenger, but have seen a car hurtle side on into a van full force, a caravan break free of its tow bar and go ploughing off into the verge, and worst of all a canoe fall out of its trailer and hurtle directly toward my car, only to bounce just before it hit me and fly overhead (that last one was so close, and so terrifying, that I had to pull over and sit parked up for 20 minute before I stopped shaking. What a horrifically tragicomic way to die. It doesn't matter what you did in your life, the most memorable thing about you would have been that you died from a faceful of high velocity boating equipment. I suspect you would be remembered, but only as a Trivial Pursuit question...).
But leaving aside the whole everyday danger of the driving process itself (i.e very heavy chunks of metal, each full of highly flammable liquid and moving at tremendous speed in close proximity to each other) you also have the added complication that there are a huge number of drivers out there who are borderline halfwits (and psychotic to boot). Last week I was stuck in a slow moving queue of traffic when, a few cars ahead of me, a 4x4 pulled out sharply in front of another 4x4. Now, in truth, I think it was a case of 'six of one and half-a-dozen of the other' as to whose fault it was - the first driver was stupid to pull out, but the second one deliberately sped up when he saw what was happening - but of course, neither of them saw it that way. So what happened was the second driver aggressively pushed his way into the next lane and pulled alongside the first car, then promptly wound down his window and started throwing handfuls of loose change at him. While still in motion. On the motorway. In the fast lane.
So the first driver wound down his window, and started returning fire, and the two of them carried on like this for a good mile, hurling coins and abuse at each other at about 25 mph, completely oblivious to everyone else. What a pair complete arsewits: on this evidence you wouldn't think they had the brains to successfully deploy a sheet of toilet paper without supervision, but somehow each has earned a license that let them pilot a two-tonne vehicle on the public road. And that, in a nutshell, is the most terrifying thing of all: you can drive as safely and carefully as you possibly can, but you can't legislate for idiots with a big heavy car, a tiny little brain and a woefully short fuse.

It's dull. This is the secret that nobody likes to admit: driving is generally dull. Not all the time, of course; there are the occasional Out Run moments when you have a clear road and the wind rushing past and the sky on the horizon looks like an oil painting - but for every minute like that there are at least 3 hours of driving at 42mph on a grey ring road, watching nothing more exciting than the misaligned windscreen washers on the VW Passat in front gently spray the roof of the vehicle with screenwash.
All of which means that people tune out. I can get out of the car at the end of a journey and my brain will have been switched off for the the whole trip: I couldn't tell you single thing about what had happened other than perhaps what had been on the radio. That's unnerving, surely? That something so dangerous and potentially life threatening is also boring? What a lethal combination....

It's expensive: Unleaded petrol in the UK current costs about £1.15 a litre. To our friends in the US, I think that works out at about $9.90 a gallon.
That is not just expensive, it's... (wait for this, it's comedy gold)... highway robbery.
(Ha, Ba-ZING! Feel free to use that one yourselves - my gift to you...)

It's time consuming: My car has done 146,336 miles, at an average speed of 34 miles an hour. That works out to be very close to 180 days in the car. Half a year, just sat in the car! And that calculation is based on full 24 hour days: if you take the average working day to be 8 hours, it means that I have spent a year and half of my life sitting inside a sodding Ford Focus, including the weekends. It pains me to think of the amazing, exciting things I could have done in that time; like writing a novel, or watching TV, or sleeping, or playing racing games on the Nintendo. The car is actually moulded to my body now: the leather around the gear stick is worn away at the back where my wedding ring had rubbed a hole in it while I change gear, and there is a shiny patch on the door sill where I tend to rest my elbow. The car has worn in around me like a pair of jeans, a process which I find strangely revolting: it kind of 'fits' me now, like a shell fits round a tortoise. Ugh.

It's unnecessary: For at vast chunk of my working life, I reckon I could have done at least 75% of my job working from home using a mobile phone and decent Internet connection. Not only that, but in doing so, I would have saved time and money, gotten to see more of my family, and improve my quality of life - all of which would have made me very grateful and hence dedicated to the employer who had the wisdom to allow me to do it. I appreciate it can't work that way all of the time, and not everybody could do it, but on some level it's got to be the future...

It's wrecking the environment. I am an inherently selfish man, with a hitherto surprisingly high tolerance for pictures of destroyed rainforests and sad looking polar bears with nothing to stand on - the ice might be melting, but my heart rarely did - which makes me quite possibly the very worst person to speak up for the environment.
But by now even I know that driving = carbon dioxide = bad. And now that I have two daughters, I'd very much prefer it if they could avoid growing up in a world where the last remaining humans navigated the flooded wastelands of Britain looking for high rise buildings they could paddle up to and start looting....

So there we have it. Homeworking for all whenever possible, that's what I say. "Four wheels bad, ADSL2+ good", to paraphrase George Orwell. The revolution may not be televised, but I'm hoping instead it comes via webcam while desktop sharing the latest Sales figures....

Enjoy our fun quiz!

Paul needs to have some beer for an evening when his friends come round. Nini is going to the supermarket, but Paul is undecided which beer he would like - and so asks her to call him from the 'wine and spirits' aisle of Tesco, and he will then choose based on what is on offer. Becks beer is on special offer, at 20 bottles for £9.99. The supermarket is 5 miles away and the family car costs about 25 pence per mile to run. Ninis mobile phone plan means a call home will cost 25 pence for the first five minutes.
Given that, on unloading the car in the rain, Paul drops the box of Becks beer and smashes half of the bottles:

1) How angry, on a scale of 1 to 10, will he be?

2) If, during the course of cleaning the mess up, he then cuts his right-hand thumb open, how angry will he then be?

3) When considered calmly and rationally, whose fault is this?
a) Pauls
b) Nobodies really, it's just one of those things

4) Despite the answer to the previous question, who will Paul actually blame?
a) Nini
b) Becks beers, for making boxes with crappy cardboard handles that tear in the wet
c) Environmentalists, on the premise that it is under pressure from them that Becks have used increasingly thinner cardboard on their box handles, making them susceptible to tearing in the wet
d) Ford cars, because the loading height on a Focus is "stupidly high"
e) "The government"

5) The bottles broke just behind the rear nearside wheel of the car. Given that it was raining heavily while Paul cleared up, and his thumb was bleeding, what is the percentage chance he has missed a bit of glass which he will then reverse over the next day, puncturing his tyre?

Later on during the evening Paul eats some Salt'n'Vinegar chipsticks and foolishly gets some of the vinegar flavouring in the open cut.

6) How much did this hurt? (You may express your answer logarithmically)

7) If the volume of Pauls scream was 3 Decibels per 'E number' contained in the chipsticks, did he scream loud enough to wake his sleeping children?

8) Why did he not have a plaster on the cut to stop such incidents happening?
a) He is too stupid.
b) The only plasters available had 'Disney Princess' pictures on them, and he was afraid that wearing one would bring a shitstorm of ridicule down on him when his friends arrived.
c) There were no longer any plasters available, because they had had 'Disney Princess' pictures on them - making them irresistible to his eldest daughter, who has cheerfully worn one a day on her school jumper for the last week as a kind of sticker.

Answers next post!

My so-called day of rest...

Sunday, traditional day of relaxation. Ha, yeah, right. Let's have a little look at how my Sunday went, shall we? And see just how restful that was..?

6:45 a.m: I am so deeply asleep that it borders on complete unconsciousness. I am so insensible, in fact, that when Nini shakes me roughly awake, saying: "Neve is screaming, it's quarter to seven and it's your turn to get up with her..", I actually mumble a thank you, rather than emit the soulful groan this news actually deserves.
6:46 a.m: I pick Neve up from her cot. She howls at high volume in my ear, actually causing me to stagger in physical pain. Although I don't know it yet, the tone of the day has now been firmly set.
6:48 a.m: Together, Neve and I watch her morning milk warm up in the microwave. Neve continues to shriek in my ear for the full minute it takes to warm up, occasionally slapping at my face. Still half asleep, I wonder briefly if this is all a dream and I am actually holding an angry cormorant.
6:56: Neve finishes her milk. I settle back on the sofa with her in my arms, hoping against bitter experience that she will fall back to sleep. She starts howling again, and pointing at her empty milk bottle. I hand it back to her, hoping that the noise will stop. She goes silent for a full five seconds, during which appears to carefully study the bottle in her hand, as if considering it's weight, heft and aerodynamic properties. She then smacks me squarely in the forehead with it. I howl. She howls. Upstairs, Amelie wakes up and howls.
7:05: Amelie appears in the doorway, asking to watch 'telewision'. I tell her she needs to take her night-time nappy off first. She disappears for a minute into the downstairs toilet, then returns, naked from the waist down, and hands me something soggy. I explain that, although I do indeed want her to remove her nappy, it doesn't mean I actually want it for myself, and also that when watching TV in polite company it is customary to do so fully clothed. She scratches at her bottom disinterestedly. Neve howls throughout.
7:45: Neve stands squarely in front of the television, about six inches from the screen - but with her back to it, laughing openly while Amelie bellows at her to move. I rub my temples, where the first spiteful tickle of the days headache makes itself gently known.
8:01: After a protracted period of furious grunting and mysterious bubbling noises, Neve fills her nappy, to her evident satisfaction. Amelie waits the customary five seconds before wrinkling her nose and shouting "Urrgh, I can smell poo!"
8:04: Neves nappy proves to be particularly unpleasant and I actually dry-heave while changing it. Both girls find this absolutely hilarious.
8:15: I go to make breakfast. Neve totters after me, shrieking to be picked up. I do so, but find it impossible to safely cut bread or load the toaster one-handed, so have to put her down. Enraged, she pummels at my knee until the kneecap makes a weird soft clicking noise and goes numb, suggesting some kind of long term damage.
8:19: Apparently furious at my temerity in handing her a piece of toast, Neve grinds it with evident venom into the sofa cushions.
8:46: Nini appears downstairs. The girls yelp with genuine delight and swarm her, giggling. For the first time since they woke up, neither of them are screaming. I gaze at their Mother balefully, feeling more than a little resentful. "You have some toast in your hair", says Nini helpfully.
9:15: I stand under the shower, which intermittently runs boiling hot and icy cold as people turn the taps on and off downstairs.
9:45: We load the girls into the car, using a tried and tested combination of threats and cajoling to ensure they agree, against their will, to be strapped into their car seats. As soon as I have done up my seatbelt, Amelie asks if I will put 'She's so lovely' on the CD player, which I estimate we have heard, at her request, approximately four thousand times since September. I say that we can maybe play it later, but right now Daddy has a headache. Amelie starts sniffing mournfully.
9:46: I start the engine. Neve starts howling again. I grip the steering wheel firmly with both hands, and fight the urge to bite on it as well.
10:02: Neve has been wailing without a break for sixteen full minutes now. Nini puts the radio on to soothe her. The radio show features a DJ who I completely loathe; I cannot hear his voice without wanting to stove the side of his head in with a claw hammer, preferably live on air. I beg that we play something (anything!) else. "We can play 'She's so lovely'..." suggests Amelie hopefully. I grit my teeth and agree the radio can stay on.
10:07: Neve falls asleep
10:09: Amelie falls asleep
10:37: We arrive at our destination, a 'retail village' of outlet stores, which we are visiting to try and find some nice clothes for Ninis birthday. Amelie is awake again and excited about buying things with the money she has in her 'Hello Kitty!' purse, which amounts to exactly 37 pence, so I fear there is going to be some disappointment in store for her. Neve is still fast asleep, so we have to wake her to put her in the pushchair. She responds to this indignity by taking her angry wailing to a whole new level, making this mornings efforts seem really quite half-hearted in comparison.
11:27: I have been walking up and down the central pathway in between the 'retail outlets' with the girls for three-quarters of an hour now, and have discovered the following:
a) There is not a single shop here that I am remotely interested in going into, with the possible exception of Starbucks, which is so busy I cannot get the pushchair into it.
b) There is not a single shop here that has anything for the girls either, unless they have suddenly developed a hitherto unspoken interest in Lacoste luggage or Bodum kitchen utensils. Even then I doubt either shop sells anything for as little as 37 pence, and that includes empty carrier bags.
c) All three of us are bored to tears. I know Amelie is, because she tells me so at a rate of about once every ninety seconds, but Neve is more subtle: she has taken to mewling sorrowfully and gazing with imploring eyes at passing shoppers, as if begging them to take her home with them.
d) Nini is clearly determined to make the most of her solo shopping experience, because she has ignored every one of the many calls I have made to her mobile. This is particularly galling for me, because only yesterday I bought her a new handset (to replace the one that Neve ruined by dunking it in a glass of water), so it appears I have essentially paid good money to give her the facility to screen my calls...
11:28: It starts raining.
11:49: Nini reappears. I smile through gritted teeth as she tells me she has bought absolutely nothing, and can't really find anything she wants. She suggests we buy a sandwich for lunch.
12:17: At a table in Pret a Manger, Amelie starts sobbing because I am eating the crisps I chose for myself, which are apparently 'better' and 'nicer' than the ones she chose, even though they are exactly the same. In desperation I tear the packet open along the sides and spread it open on the table so we can share them, at which point Neve reaches across and gently tugs the whole packet onto the floor.
12:45: Another search of the shops has revealed nothing Nini likes, making the trip a complete bust, so we trudge back to the car. Neve refuses to sit in her pushchair and demands to be carried, so Amelie then refuses to walk and must be pushed in the pushchair. I start idly planning the many, many ways I will be 'difficult' in my old age...
13:21: We stop off in TK Maxx, where I take Amelie to the toys, explaining that I will give her a little extra money so that she can buy something. She immediately gravitates towards a fairy princess castle for £60. I try to explain that there is an enormous difference between £60 and 37 pence, but her eyes glaze over within seconds. In the end, after many return visits to 'just look at the box' of the fairy castle, we leave with a small stuffed toy sealion.
14:46: Back at home, I stretch out on the sofa. Amelie demands we play a game where I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep, then she puts the toy sealion on my chest, and then I pretend to wake up and be shocked to find it. Both girls find this falling-down hilarious and want to endlessly repeat it, but by the 27th time we've played out the scenario I start to worry that when I actually do fall asleep I'll be having nightmares about being smothered in my bed by large sea-going mammals...
14:50: Nini takes the girls off into the playroom, and almost immediately I fall asleep for real on the sofa
14:55: I am rudely awakened when Neve, who clearly still wants to play the 'wake up' game, totters back into the front room and pounds on my chest with a remarkably heavy plastic giraffe (the bruises are still there, 3 days later)...
15:09: After my extensive rest I decide I may as well quickly attend to one of the nagging little ten-minute jobs that has needed doing around the house for ages: I will fix the loose bath panel that has come away at one end.
16:10: Whistling, I disappear upstairs with the single screwdriver I believe I need.
16:17: I come back downstairs for two other screwdrivers, a hammer and some panel pins. I return, no longer whistling.
16:23: I come back downstairs for my whole toolbox. I am scowling.
17.12: Two hours after I started, I complete the 'little ten-minute' job I set out to do.
17:35: Dinner. I don't often get to eat with the girls, and in the time since I last ate with her, it's very clear that Neve has really developed her motor skills: she can throw her food much further now than she could back then.
19:22: A few hours later, the girls are bathed and in bed, sleeping peacefully. The house has been tidied. I can relax. I head downstairs to watch TV.
19:23: Nini is not only watching 'Sense and Sensibility', but informs me that 'Lark Rise to Candleford' is on after that - she has basically lined up a full two hours of watching period drama featuring women in bonnets.
19:24: I decide I would quite like a vodka.
19:46: I decide I would quite like another vodka.
20:07: Yep, keep 'em coming....

Extortion and bumper cars

Off to Nanny and Gumps in Brighton for a long overdue visit. We didn't pick the best weekend in terms of the weather (the cloud cover sat there, brooding spitefully, waiting for the second we got out of the car) but decided a trip to the Palace Pier was in order anyway.
It's been along time since I spent any time in Brighton: I moved out of Sussex when I got my first job, and although I always had a hankering to move back, we've never actually won the lottery or pulled any bank jobs and so have sadly been unable to afford it. It's changed a lot - when I left, nearly 20 years ago, Brighton was becoming a ghost town, full of closed up shops, houses for sale and no tourists. Not any more: now it's a Boomtown, and an expensive one...
If you can't get to Brighton in the near future, and want to get a feel for what it's like now (at least, the weekend tourist experience) just print off a picture of Brighton Pavillion, prop it on your mantelpiece, then invite 50 strangers round to jostle you in your own front room while you burn a tenner every fifteen minutes...
Anyway the pier trip. Amelie was insistent that Nanny come in the car with us, which meant that my mother 'helped' me with the driving all the way, as follows:

1. Sighing heavily at the traffic, and saying at no less than 3 minute intervals: "I told you we would have been better off on the bus"
2. Pointing out the turnings we should have taken in the rear view mirror
3. Reading out each posted speed limit to me, presumably as a safety precaution in case I had temporarily forgotten how to read, or the concept of roadsigns hadn't caught on in my part of the UK
   
4. Huffing noisily and saying "Is it me, or is hot in here?"
5. Carefully selecting for us the single most expensive car park in the world, which sported the laughable rate of 80 pence for every 15 minutes, or part thereof.
   

I am still suffering 'walletshock' at the car park prices: £3.20 an hour! I am reasonably sure I could rent carpetted office floorspace to park the car on for that kind of money. What galled me the most were the policies the car park had of (a) not informing you of the costs until you are at the ticket machine and thus completely unable to leave because of all the cars in the queue behind you and (b) letting you enter the car park while it was full, so that you waste 20 minutes (yes, that's £1.60) just driving around the sodding place looking for a space. Anyone who thinks crime doesn't pay should take a good look at the NCP...

But once we had gotten on to the pier, ah, then it was all worthwhile - due primarily to one incident: Amelies first ever go on the dodgems. At the end of the pier there is a funfair, and there is a dedicated section just for children under 5, and they have a set of kiddie bumper cars. Amelie had never been in one, has no clue that cars have pedals, and has never made the mental connection that turning the steering wheel makes the car change direction - but it's a bumper car, right? They are designed to hit things, so what harm could possibly come of it? What damage could she do?
Well, as it turns out, what she could do was try her very best to hospitalise the ride attendant. When the ride started she sat there, grinning ear-to-ear and spinning the wheel, but the car was completely immobile. So the ride operator came over to help her. He pushed the car forward a little, and told her that she had to press the pedal. She duly did so, but as she had been spinning the steering wheel the car lurched in a tight right-hand circle and crunched noisily into his right knee. My mother and Nini starting giggling.
He rubbed his knee ruefully while Amelie beamed up at him expectantly, waiting for instructions. "The other way", he said, "turn the wheel the other way." Amelie spun the wheel, pressing the pedal just gently enough that the car spun anticlockwise on the spot and neatly ran over his left foot. Nini and my mother began howling with laughter and clutching at the railings for support.
He looked visibly upset now, and pushed the car firmly forward and well away from him. "Push the pedal down, and steer" he called. Amelie obediently jammed her foot hard down into the footwell at random, hit the wrong pedal by accident, and reversed the car at high speed directly into his crotch. I could hear the air escape from his lungs in a sudden strangled gasp, even over the noise of the ride and the shrieking seagulls. I couldn't hear Mum and Nini though, because they had lost the power of speech and were now shaking, crying silent tears of mirth. Amelie also started laughing, thinking it was all part of the game. From the operators face it was clear this wasn't appreciated...
He stood well back, and tried once last time: "Push the other pedal..." She did, and the car made a lazy arc to the right, promptly got clipped by another car, and was directed at high speed back into his right leg. Amelie smiled happily up at him, and Mum and Nini became so insensible that I started to worry that they'd lose bladder control. At this point the attendant decided to cut his losses and left her to it, hobbling all the way,
When the ride was over, I met Amelie at the gate, smiling politely at the attendants sour glare as I did so. "Was that fun?" I asked her.
"Yes. Did Mummy and Nanny see me driving the car?" she asked, hopefully.
"Yes. Oh yes..."
"Why are they crying?"
I glanced over at the the two figures still howling and gasping for breath on the railings.
"Oh, no reason..."

While we're being honest....

Nini and I had a nice light-hearted (and yet stupidly dangerous) discussion today - one of those ones married couples have that starts as joke, but can all too easily spill over into the divorce courts - about our top five irritations with our partner. At least, it started that way, but Nini didn't seem prepared to stop at five and kept going, so I had to walk out while she was still in full flight.
Here is the gist of the five things I did manage to hear:

1. You are the grumpiest man in the world in the morning. It is a close-run thing, but I think I actually prefer the mornings when you don't speak, and simply fart loud enough to wake the dead before stamping out of the house to go to work. Compared to the days where we actually engage in any conversation before 8:30 a.m, those are your polite mornings...
2. Stop telling me to move out of the way or hurry up. I am not a child, you are not at work so I don't need 'product managing', and most of all you are not the boss of me.
3. When we are watching TV and the phone rings for me, you tut and sigh and make me go into the other room, saying "That's why we bought a cordless!" When we are watching TV and the phone rings for you, you tut and sigh and make 'turn it down' gestures, snarling "I'm on the phone". Both of these scenarios often happen in the same evening, often within minutes of each other, and I swear that if I have to suffer this double-standard one more time, you will be needing the phone to call for an ambulance - and I will be turning the TV up as high as it will go while you try and make that call....
4. When you come home and ask "What's for dinner?", and I tell you, do not then either sigh loudly, or say "oh" in a disappointed voice. It is incredibly rude. Furthermore, you need to grow up and understand that nobody can expect cheeseburgers or toad-in-the-hole for dinner every single night: that is a childish fantasy, and there is compelling medical evidence to suggest that people who only eat stuff like that are dropping dead all over the place. When nutritionists recommend 'five-a-day', they are not talking about your favourite processed meat product, or bags of pickled onion Monster Munch.
5. Can you please, for the love of all that is good in the world, stop cupping your genitals? You don't even know you are doing it, and you do it all the time...look, you're doing it NOW, while I'm talking to you about it...

And for me, regarding her:

1. If we were ever to gather all our drinking glasses together we would have far too many to fit in the cupboard. Fortunately, that will never happen, because you like to keep a big collection of them sitting half-filled next to your bed (adding a new one each night), or on random windowsills of the house to collect dust.
2. What's the point in having a mobile phone, if you leave the bloody thing at home? There's already a non-mobile phone line at home, we don't need another one. This is particularly galling if, when you go out and I need to reach you, I try to call you up only to hear your mobile ringing from three feet away, under the sofa cushions. And I will also add that mobile phones don't run on magic, and even if you have actually taken it with you, it still needs to be both charged up and switched on before it can actually function in the way it was intended...
   
3. I don't care what you say, that is your hair blocking the plughole. It's ten times longer than mine. Why I am I dealing with it?
4. When I say I don't like satsumas or some other food product, it is NOT - and I want to be very clear here - because I have "never been given a proper one to try". It is because I don't like the taste of satsuma. The taste of satsuma has not changed dramatically since I last tried one, and the fact that it is you who chose it in the supermarket will make absolutely no difference to the flavour. This also applies to recipes; I will not magically start liking rice pudding because you made it, it is still just rice pudding, you don't know best here, and I don't want any.
5. Dammit, woman, I have to cup my genitals to keep them protected because you have the habit of catching them with a swinging arm, or the edge of the hoover, or a thrown object, on pretty much a weekly basis. You are basically clumsy around my genitals, and it is not funny when you (or increasingly, our daughters - who are so like their mother) manage to inadvertently wallop me in "Daddy's special hurty place" and I end up with my face pressed into the carpet moaning softly. Also, when that happens, please do not sit one of the children on my back and say "Look girls, Daddy is a horsey". You might find this hilarious, but it is just not funny, and I think it encourages them.

Ah, honesty in marriage. I can see why some folks think it's overrated.

My wife is trying to kill me...

This is her masterplan:

• Convince unwell husband (man flu) to take a break and go into a nice hot shower to clear his chest, get clean, and feel better.
• Wait until you can actually hear that he is completely under the shower and has probably got a hair full of shampoo, and then...
• TURN THE WASHING MACHINE ON so that he is left, eyes full of stinging soap, in a high pressure jet of suddenly freezing cold water
• Listen in quiet satisfaction to him howling wordlessly at the injustice of it all.

She seemed so nice when I met her. Patient. Kind. There were no signs of psychotic behaviour at all...