The Time Bubble

In case you've been wondering why all the late night music links, and bloggage about family, friends and such like is that I've had something preying on my mind over the past week, that was finally set to rest today. I've been a typical man and buried my head in the sand and not gone to the Doctors, even over a month after the symptoms first started. But it is only since Thursday last week when I casually described the symptoms to Alex and he mentioned that someone else he knew had the same symptoms and had ended up with pneumonia I started to panic. As someone with a history of heart/ blood pressure problems stretching back to 2003 this was not good. The symptoms, a weird fluttering sensation in my chest, couldn't place whether it was from the heart, the lungs, digestive tract or wherever, but just made me feel plain damned weird! Of course I start imagining all sorts of horrible thoughts about what it could be, then how my wonderful family would cope without me ...

Well here I am safely returned from across, or should I say, under "La Manche". Luckily the old gits did not succeed in their plan! http://www.casttv.com/video/hkrq7f4/harry-enfield-old-gits-channel-tunnel-video Alex picked me up at 6am and we were set fair on the drive to Folkestone. Apart from the usual slowdown around the M25 we made it in good time, in fact we were able to get a train half an hour before the scheduled one. This was my first time for me through the channel tunnel, and how easy was it? Amazingly so. When I think of the aggravation of the past, getting on and off ferries, not to mention the horror of the airport experience these days, this was a piece of the proverbial. If you haven't been, you literally drive your car straight into a train, park up, sit there and crack open the flask of coffee, sit back and relax, off goes the train and about 40 minutes later drive out the other end, hey presto! You're in France! Inside the train ...

Well, years on since the credit crunch and it's all doom and gloom, austerity, the UK billions in debt etc. And other countries in an even worse mess. But I know the answer! Never one to shy away from controversy I have come up with an awesome plan to save the world! Well starting with the UK anyway. Now throughout this article you will find a few pictures leading up to this answer, perhaps they will give you a clue as we go along. Here's one to get you started. Cheers! Go on, have another! As I say, there's a simple solution to all this. I can tell the Government exactly where it has been going wrong all these years. One of the things that we always hear about it the "Pensions timebomb", it's bankrupting the country, people are living too long etc. So they talk about raising the retirement age a year or two. Now pensions were a great idea when we were expected to live to three score years and ten. Retire at 65, "thank-you very much sir, here ...

...is a cigar called? Well I wouldn't know, though the last time I had one, after the birth of my second child (forced on me by the lads in the pub) I did enjoy it. I'm not a smoker as you know, one of the few sins (as well as drugs) that just aren't me. As for all the other things, well, you have to enjoy life, don't you. And enjoy it, I certainly do. I have a pretty enjoyable lifestyle I have to admit, I earn enough money, in one way or another (don't ask) on top of Claire's earnings for us to have a pretty comfortable life. Quite honestly, I think people should turn their talents to whatever suits them and if you can find a way to live, without having to work yourself into an early grave then do it. I say this, because if it hadn't been for that health scare eight years ago I doubt whether I'd be here now. At 33, I may have owned a house, had a good job and all the rest of it but I wasn't happy. Two nights in hospital with blood pressure of 20...

Once again during my trip to London I passed by close to the London Eye and got to wondering if anyone had ever had a shag on it. In public I am guessing probably not as you go in a car with about 30 other people and there are not exactly any hidey holes where one could perform such a feat, even if your lady sat on your lap it would look suspicious. I am thinking maybe being tossed off under a blanket might just about be feasible, but hardly the most romantic way to take advantage of the setting of floating high above the London skyline. Now with it being Valentine's day and all, I thought, whoever runs this wheel is missing a trick here. What an opportunity to get make some serious money by offering the ultimate Valentine's day date. Now as we all know there's loads of idiots with more money than sense in London (bankers, stockbrokers, MP's - take your pick) so why not get them to spend some of it. Now for what I propose I would suggest perhaps a fee of say £5,000....

End Of Part One! Back in Doctor Who's heyday, most episodes would end with a cliffhanger. I thought in another world where I might have played the Doctor, this shot would have made a good final still of the episode with the daleks screaming "exterminate", cue rolling of the credits and the audience thinking, "how is he going to get out of this one?" Just come back from a fab day out in London. Such things take a fair bit of organising what with the kids and all, but on this occasion Claire and I went without them. I was not going to take baby Jamie anyway, but I did offer to take Ollie. Now the highlight of our day was to be the Doctor Who Experience at Olympia, but when I showed Ollie the preview on the internet, he said "No I don't want to go to that, it looks a bit scary, can I go to Grampy's house instead?" Well who am I to argue, so Grampy came at 9am to collect the boys and off we went on the train! Was on the train at 9:41 a...

As you'll know the karaoke circuit is a venue down at the moment. The loyal and ever growing crew who loyally follow us around (Thursday at the Kings, Friday at the Star, Sunday at the White Hart) are missing their Friday nights at present. What are the regulars doing on Fridays? - probably staying in I would imagine. Like with most people who go to pubs for a specific purpose - if that purpose stops they don't go down regardless. So we are down to just two karaoke nights on the circuit now, on Thursday and Sunday. Back in 2003, when the White Horse changed their name to the Mustang (NB: changing pub names is never a good idea when will they learn!), stopped their Sunday night quizzes (as they wanted to attract a younger element), we stopped going down there. For a while we had our own quizzes at home and got pissed on cheap wine instead. Then we found a new pop music quiz over at the Bull at Launton which I frequented through to 2008 when I stopped as I began doing karao...

Those of you that follow me will be familiar with the concept of "JTV" which basically refers to how I watch television. I don't know anyone else who watches TV like me. But then I don't know anyone really who does anything like I do. I've never been quite sure if this makes me an individual or some sort of freak, who knows, I am sure you have got your own opinions! I just keep going along in a way that seems to work for me and seem to have muddled through alright so far! To briefly recap, this means that other than the incessant Cbeebies during the day and a bit of sport here and there I watch hardly any live TV, the average evening's entertainment consisting of a carefully planned schedule of DVD/ Blu-Ray viewing. And not for me the consuming a whole box set in a few nights, no, my shows are carefully rationed so for example we are currently watching Heroes - this is scheduled for Wednesday nights, one episode a week so it will take nearly six months t...

Well, it appears the point of my last blog may have been missed - so just to clarify. I love the subject of the weather, predicting the weather with a range of tools, in fact you could say I am an amateur meteorologist. I find it quite exciting when a weather event approaches e.g. major snowfall, storm, heatwave etc, trying to predict how it will all play out, and offering my opinions on the outcome. Now snow is notoriously hard to predict correctly, but I have successfully forecast the last 3 major snowfalls correctly as well as telling overexcited people when there isn't going to be snow, which more often than not there isn't. What I hate is people making cliched comments that they think are funny. Now today I knew that the snow would start as a light powder and do nothing much in the first few hours. I could also correctly predict that Joe Public would come on to facebook to deride the apparent poor amount of snow, failing to take into account that it would come later. S...

It never ceases to amaze me how the weather seems to amaze other people! Now we all know that talking about the weather is a national British pastime, but honestly, I can never understand the surprise that comes across people, the media, you name it, whenever what I would class as quite normal weather patterns emerge. "BIG FREEZE ON THE WAY" screams the headline on the Daily Express, on a pretty much annual basis. No shit, sherlock, it's January 30th. Now if you put that up on June 30th you might grab my attention. "OMG - it's -3c" comes a random status on facebook. "Can't believe it". Well I can - it gets that cold every year. I have seen statuses marvelling at the fact that rainfall is occurring. And similar such comments regarding the heat in the summer. Seriously people, how long have you lived in this country? Let's face facts in every year, we are going to get some exceptionally windy days, a few downpours of rain, some cold...