The Time Bubble

It seems I have written acres of material about my kids since I started - enough to fill two books and more. It hasn't escaped Ollie's notice and he has begun to take an interest in what I am doing. So much so, it has inspired him to start writing his own diary of what he did on holiday. It's his birthday soon - he will be 6 at the end of August and I am toying with ideas for what to get him. He has already grown out of the leappad and I am well aware of the existence of tablets designed specifically for children such as the Kurio one. How young is too young to access the internet, have an email address or write a blog? In my opinion, as long as it is safe and filtered, it is never too early to start. With the speed that technology is developing, I believe IT skills to be every bit as important as the classic "3 R's". Anyone not tech savvy in the next generation may as well be illiterate. So I am now handing over my blog to Ollie, with pictures of the firs...

My attempts to write on this holiday have been seriously hampered by a couple of problems. Firstly that my bluetooth keyboard, so handy in Fuerteventura absolutely refuses to work, leaving me to type on the touchscreen which I hate and secondly the wifi here at Butlins is highly unreliable. At least in the room anyway. You get 15 mins a day free, after that it is 7 quid a day, which I would consider if it was fast and reliable but it drops out all the time so I won't pay it. And the 3g signal here is even worse than usual, my phone has accessed it extremely sporadically. It took about 8 hours on Tuesday to upload that picture I took of Ollie bowling. There is no point me rabbitting on about what a holiday at Butlins is like as you have heard it all before, so I will focus on something new. Today I am afraid you all missed an extremely rare opportunity to see me make an absolute laughing stock in public. This completely unplanned and unscripted debut of mine into the world of a...

This is a first for a blog entry from me. I am not actually typing this at all. I am actually using Dragon dictation software which is working fantastically. I actually bought this software about 18 months ago. But shortly afterwards my computer died and I bought a new one. I neglected to install the software on the new computer until today, so it's been sitting unused all that time. It really is an amazing piece of software. I am hardly having to correct a thing, and it's quite nice being able to sit here and just talk and not type. Anyway, I guess we had better get on with the blog, which continues with the story of my holiday. So, our time at Butlins was coming to an end. However, I had some repairs to effect to the car before we left. On Thursday morning I got up to discover the wing mirror on the drivers side hanging off the car. Now I had had problems with this before it had been knocked off previously that it had been repaired effectively. We had managed to dri...

Ollie - live on stage with Katy (well the top of his head anyway). One of the undoubted highlights of our trip to Butlins was the live show of I Can Cook. Every Wednesday, Katy Ashworth comes down to Minehead for an hour long "I Can Cook - Live". The show was free but you had to queue to get tickets for it - which I did - halfway around the Skyline Pavillion, shortly after breakfast. We managed to get tickets for the morning showing, and so, just before 11am on Wednesday we entered "Reds" the large venue in which the show was being held and looked for somewhere to sit - not that easy among hundreds of adults and children. Fortunately there was an area down by the front where the kids were sitting on the floor, so Ollie and I made our way down there, and found a place on the extreme right of the stage. As it turned out this happened to be precisely the best place to go, as right where we sat down was what appeared to be a portable sink unit. More of that la...

Well, here we are, at last, the first of the much awaited holiday blogs. Just to recap, we spent 11 nights down in the West Country, 4 at Butlins in Minehead, followed by a week in a caravan in North Devon. So much to cover! Where does one start? Well in the time-honoured and linear story telling style that is chronological order. We set sail from fair Bicester in dry if somewhat cloudy conditions. But it was not long before we encountered stormy waters - quite literally. The journey was conducted in one of those strange climactic days where you could be driving through a torrential downpour one minute, before emerging into bright sunshine and ground dry as a bone, where literally it had been like a lake a mere mile earlier. Unfortunately our arrival at Butlins co-incided with one such monsoon period, leaving us no option to get soaked despite having our own personal parking space (as one gets in deluxe accomodation) just a few yards from the door we all managed to get comple...

I may have made an error of judgement. Not often you hear that sort of admission from me, but even so... The Sirenis Seaview: Wish I was there? Let you know in a couple of weeks. I return once again to the subject of holidays. You'll remember, this is that topic that despite all my best laid plans never quite goes according to those plans. This time last year we were freshly arrived at the Sirenis Seaview hotel in Ibiza for two weeks, on an all inclusive deal which I thought was pretty decent value at the price Bet365 generously paid for it, about £1650. The hotel was lovely the weather was beautiful and the place had a most amazing entertainment team who could not do enough for the kids. Sadly, this was not enough, the food poisoning we all suffered due to being at the mercy of the "canteen" as we called it, put a real dampener on the trip. Then there was the continued horror of getting there, the aggro of getting through the airports with all the r...