Dom Davis (The Blog)

"Blogging is not writing, it's graffiti with punctuation!"

Let’s face it, Po was a shed. Literally. We kept wood in her. She was also gutless. Doing 45, wanting to overtake if you dropped her into 4th and nailed the accelerator to the floor absolutely nothing happened. When we got her she already had a number of small dents and badly patched stone chips. The radio didn’t work properly and her gearbox, brakes and exhaust all either gave way, or were on the way out.

New car (as yet unnamed, likely to be after a Pokémon. Definitely a male), despite being older then Po, is shiny. If you ignore the scratch and dent that some #%$€ caused with a trolley some 3 as after we got him he looked undamaged. The bodywork was shiny, the upholstery was clean and the boot wasn’t home to a number of spiders. New car also has a bigger engine, something I’m still getting used to, disk brakes, electric windows, air conditioning and a radio that works. New car is also larger than Po, heavier than Po and has more travel on the brake pedal before anything actually happens, which has caused some interesting moments.

This weekend I finally got new car on a road where I could stretch its legs and also see what 10ish to 60 was like, as well as 40-60. Unsurprisingly it’s faster than Po. Despite my clumsy gear changes and unsure start I got it out of a roundabout at a deliberate crawl and up to 60, still in 4th easily. I suspect Po (who I’d got very good at doing 0-60 in a time very close to that quoted in the manual) would still be at 50, having just been slung into 5th, engine screaming in protest at that point. 40-60 was also easier, no dropping down to 3rd and hurting the engine, or waiting for 5 minutes while the engine picked up in 4th. I may even be able to overtake in this car.

Sadly, despite being faster, new car is nowhere near as fun as Po was. In her I was less worried about the time it took to 60 and more the challenge of getting it there before you ran out of road, especially 4 up, where 60 wasn’t a given, it was an achievement. And herein lies the problem. You could drive Po like a lunatic and never really get yourself into trouble, apart from, perhaps, going through the brakes and destroying the gearbox :S So I did. I’d absolutely thrash the nuts of her and have a scream while doing it. New car is shiny. I care about damaging new car. I care about hurting the engine and I worry about getting into trouble if I drive like a lunatic with the bigger engine. I also really don’t want to destroy another gearbox. New car gets driven sensibly. And that’s boring.

Slimelight is, as I’m sure we’ve established in previous posts, a sod of a long way away these days meaning that going clubbing is even more of a trek than it ever was. In an attempt to find something a little more local I have been trying to get to Exile at the Waterfront in Norwich for about a year now. The problem with this is that it’s only on 4 times a year, it’s a completely unknown quantity and the club is split across 3 music genres, one of which I will likely sit out, one of which I lack the hair for, leaving just one to dance to. These things combined mean I’m not overly keen on just rocking up by myself as, even if it is a blinding night, there is a large likelihood of sitting about on my todd being a billy no mates.

The good news is that I have convinced 2 people (maybe 4, but the latter two haven’t confirmed yet and have been notoriously crap at actually being available on the day – hence not going to the past 4 Exiles) to come along for the next one in March. Life is, however, conspiring to break this date.

First off we have work. We’ve got a big release going out. And I mean big. This is going to involve people working overnight, large numbers of people in during the weekend and staying in the office until its either complete, or we’ve rolled back. Despite jokes of “If it’s not done by 9:30pm on Saturday we’re rolling back and going out” it makes things a bit tricky to plan.

Secondly, and a little bit more left field, we have Eisenfunk, who are apparently playing Slimelight that night. Which would be a cool gig to go to. Ordinarily I’d be there without a second thought, especially since The Zozo said “well why not just go to that instead”, meaning I have the extension to the late pass without even asking. The problem is the thought of it fills me with both excitement and tiredness, which is more than a bit bizarre, I can tell you.

The fact of the matter is that I will probably have to be up from 5am on the Saturday and, without a hotel, will be awake, with a large amount of bouncing around, until at least 11:30am the next day (maybe later, I’ve not checked the trains yet). With hotel allows for sleep but adds cost and means getting back a lot later. It’s a dilemma.

Anyway, I shall moot the idea of clubbing in London with the others and see what they say. Chances are they’ll not be up for it and we’ll stick to the original plan. Maybe…

Having checked gig times, train times and spoken to the others it would seem Exile is the path of least resistance and most sleep. We’ll stick with the original plan

On Friday The Zozo took delivery of nearly two and a half cubic meters of wardrobe which were order to solve the problem of the spare room acting more like a loft than anything else. Having now pretty much moved everything from the old house into the new flat¹ we were coping with the fact that we used to have two large cupboards and a ruddy great loft to store things in and we now had nothing to replace these. Cue Ikea and Pax wardrobes. I love Pax; anything that can be configured to store two 30″ monitor boxes gets my vote, although this time it’s been configured to hold plastic boxes, fabric boxes and my lighting rig.

The wardrobes were delivered on Friday, along with a kitchen sink, plumbing for same and the legs for some kitchen units. Something tells me that someone is going to be describing how Ikea delivered everything but the kitchen sink as we didn’t order those and for us to have them means someone else doesn’t. Saturday I set to work building them, an activity I find strangely enjoyable. Flatpack is a bit like Lego for adults. Sunday was reserved for filling them.

Sunday morning I cordoned off a small area in the living room and allocated that as Zo and Willow space. The rest of the house was mine to dump stuff in as I needed. Mid way through the day and the hallway was full of stuff, as was the living room, and the spare room was still buried under crap. Eventually, however, I got on top of things and stuff started going back inside. By about 4:30 I was done. The spare room is still full of stuff but it’s now in 3 piles. A large pile for The Zozo to EBay, a smaller pile of stuff to skip and an even smaller pile of “where are we going to put this?”

All that remains to be done now is to put hardware on the doors and drawers so we can open them without extreme faff. This was going to be from Homebase but they are proving to be singularly useless having failed to stock most of what we’ve needed over the past month or more, so instead we’ve ordered online from B&Q.

I’m still staggered by the amount of stuff we managed to fit into Little Cottage

¹ The contents of the shed remain to be retrieved but since I don’t even know what’s in one of the two boxes in there I suspect most of that is destined for the skip or EBay.

So having sat in the barbers blogging about how I hated the borrowed car I then proceeded to head back to the old house to get stuff out of the loft. In order to make space for the neighbours I moved the car to make room… and was promptly rear ended.

Now, this is an open and public forum and we’re still sorting out the whole mess so you’ll forgive me if I’m light on details here, but, suffice to say I was being ultra careful, which is why I was a little surprised to hear a screeching of brakes follow by a bang as I acquired a peugeot up my arse.

This was load 1 of 3 or 4 I wanted to bring from the house that day. Needless to say not much more moving happened that day. Getting out of that house is proving to be an absolute bitch

The only plus side of the whole sorry tale is that the car I was driving was on loan from the garage and didn’t contain Willow. They remain unharmed. The same cant be said for my flash guns which were in the back of the car.

So with Po dead and the Corolla not ready to be collected I’m faced with driving the Fiat Punto we’ve been leant. And I hate it. Po was easy to drive with a lot of give in the clutch, wide pedal spacing and a pathetic engine. She’d stall when it was cold, but you just needed to press the loud pedal more.

The Punto has a bigger engine, tighter gearbox and a stiff clutch. I stalled 4 times just getting the damn thing off the drive. The biting point is not where I expect it to be and there is zero tolerance if you miss it. The pedals are also closer together resulting in me catching the accelerator when going for the clutch.

The only saving grace is its practically cavernous compared to Po which will be useful today as I drive the hateful thing between the two houses shifting stuff. I’d probably rate it at 1.5-2 Po’s in the back with the seats down.

I wonder how I will get on with the Corolla with its mighty 1.4L engine. I suspect I’ll stall that lots too :S

It’s getting to the time of year where people are beginning to ask me what I want for my birthday. Herein lies a problem. There is a gap of roughly £2K between what is socially acceptable to ask for and the cheapest item on my list of things I would like. Bear in mind this is the full list of things I would like, not just the things I’d like for my birthday

Having just moved house and thrown away or sold a load of stuff I’m a bit loathe to be acquiring more stuff. I don’t really drink, most of my media is now digital and I’ve been away from home long enough that I already have all the things one needs in the house. This all goes towards making me an absolute sod to buy for. Or at least it would, were it not for Jelly Beans.

I love Jelly Beans. I will quite happily eat them until I feel sick. And then wait 5 minutes and eat more. Jelly beans also have another advantage: one can buy variable quantities. If, for example, a family member didn’t love me enough to spend £20 on me then they could spend £5 instead (did you see what I did there? ). Jelly Beans would appear to be the perfect solution. There is one small fly in the ointment.

Not all beans are created equal. For starters I like the Jelly Belly beans, not the cheap imitations. Secondly, not all flavours are created equal, and some are down right nasty. So how do you know which flavours to buy? It’s a toughie, but there are some simple rules one can follow to mitigate the problem.

Simplest of all is you could just purchase a gift box or tube or mixed beans. I will sort these into three piles containing indelible, passable and tasty beans. The passable and tasty beans will be eaten (separately) and the indelible ones passed onto others who like them. This method is not fool proof and some tasty beans look very much like indelible ones. I will err on the side of caution here which will result in between 10 and 20% wastage.

The safer option is to simply get the mix box (£5 ish) or 1Kg bag (£20.40 + over £5 p&p) of sour beans. It’s a limited selection of flavours but they all fall into the tasty category. If there is access to mix your own bean counters then simply taking from the list of: water melon, pear, orange, any cola ones, anything with the word sherbet in it, any sour ones, cinnamon, and the other spicy ones who’s name escapes me and you’ll be fine.

If you wanted to get creative and you have access to mix your own then follow the simple rule of no brown, black, white, or off white beans. In general black and brown are inedible (the exception being the cola ones) as they tend to be chocolate (wrong in a bean), one of many coffee flavours (just wrong) or liquorice (which I’ve never liked). The white and whitish ones are usually the more savoury flavours (popcorn for example) which are edible but don’t go well with the others and just aren’t as tasty. I’ve yet to find a brightly coloured bean I didn’t like (with the exception of the bamboozled flavours, but they only come in prepackaged box form).

So there you go, the guide to getting me the perfect gift for my birthday (or Christmas as this advice holds until further notice). In the mean time I need to work out if anyone wants to get in on buying beans in bulk. You can get individual flavours in 1Kg bags, but to get a proper mix you need at least 5-10 flavours which is 5-10Kg of beans and, more importantly one or two hundred quid, which could arguably be better spent. ideally I need to find enough people that we can put in for a good mix and walk away with 1Kg each but I don’t know 5 or more insane people who love beans as much as I do

I took this Monday off in order to sort out a few things to do with the move and perform some other little jobs we had planned. Monday’s off are usually pretty benign, choosing instead to strike on Tuesday, or whenever my first day back at work is. Not always though. And not yesterday.

Po, our car, is a great little run around. She might be small, and she might not be all that powerful, but she’s been a great little workhorse despite the fact we’ve treated her like a shed (literally, we quite often stored wood in her). Sadly getting Willow in and out of Po is a bit of a struggle as she’s only a 3 door. She also needs work on the exhaust and the brakes during the next MOT so when we noticed the exhaust coming off last weekend we decided it was time to trade in for a slightly bigger car.

For the past week we’ve kept driving Po to a minimum in order that the exhaust didn’t fall off before we’d got a new car, something we planned to do yesterday. That part of the plan worked like a charm what’d we were able to drop off Little Willow at Moomin Nanas house and head to North Walsham to sell Po back to the people we’d bought her from and use that to offset the cost of something with 5 doors. Po had other ideas.

Less than a mile from the garage Po and Monday teamed up to strike back at our plan of selling Po. I pulled up to a red light at a junction, popped it out of 3rd and pushed the gear stick all the way over too.. well, about -5. The gear stick had become very floppy and first was quite a bit further over to the left. Something was not right.

Pulling off was fun. Thinking something was amiss I pulled away very gently and only just got Po going. She wasn’t in 1st, and from the way she was struggling it was more likely 2nd, if not 3rd. Wobbling the gear stick about (the linear H type action of the gear stick was gone) had nothing where second was, but I found a gear where 3rd used to be. The engine revved harder than the gear I thought was first, so I put the gear lever back to the left and nursed the car along.

The next set of lights stayed resolutely red meaning I had to stop and then pull off in Maybe-2nd-Maybe-3rd-But-Certainly-Not-1st gear again. While stopped I had another play with the gear box. I could move from Maybe-3rd-But-Certainly-Not-1st to Should-Be-3rd-But-Revs-Faster-Than-Maybe-3rd-But-Certainly-Not-1st without moving the gear stick back. It just flapped from side to side.

Po limped into the garage where I found a spot and dumped her. Regardless of if we bought a new car or not she wasn’t going anywhere without a major overhaul. This was confirmed by the people at the garage who told us we’d need a new gearbox and were looking at over a grand to get Po road worthy again. Despite Po being worth substantially less than 5 minutes previously the garage will still willing to give us a good price for her and we traded her in for a grey 2003 1.4L 5 door Toyota Corolla.

With Po out of action and our new car (yet to be named) needing to be serviced, MOTd and valeted before we could take it (possibly him) home we were a bit carless. Thankfully the garage leant us a Fiat Punto to drive until our new car is ready… which means they’ve got our old car, our new car and our money and all we’ve got is a car they’re going to auction when we return it because it’s not worth fixing… something didn’t quite work out there

I’m hoping that Monday has got it out of its system and today will just be Tuesday and not Tuesday-With-A-Hint-Of-Monday.

We moved out of Little Cottage this weekend and into Rented Flat. Rented flat has two more bedrooms that Little Cottage and the living room is quite a bit larger so we have more space for Willow and she now has her own room.

Moving day itself wasn’t too stressful. We’d moved 4 Po loads (not quite as much as you Might imagine, Po is quite small) already and we’d hired a removal company to shift our furniture. That’s not to say there wasn’t stress.

Two days before the move we discovered that the removal company had no knowledge of our booking and there was a period where I didn’t know what was going to happen with the larger bits of furniture or how we were going to move them. To compensate for this we did move rather a lot more with the removal company than they’d quotes me for, filling an entire 3.5 ton truck with our stuff (its amazing how much Little Cottage held). All that was left was a bit in the bathroom, a bit in the bedroom, the kitchen, the loft and the shed.

The plan for the remaining items was to leave Willow with her grandparents and spend Sunday with a borrowed car with much more carrying capacity (5 Pos? Maybe more) and shift the majority of the remainder. Then it snowed. Heavily. Sunday was spent sorting Rented Flat and moving had to be crammed in between other things on Monday. Suffice to say half the kitchen, the loft and the shed still need to be done. That will happen next weekend now.

I’ve blogged before (on a previous blog I think) about emails from Camelot regarding lottery tickets. My argument was that the subject line was graded so you’d know at a glance if you were looking at a life changing win, a windfall or chump change. I’m not sure if Camelot have heeded my advice, but I’m sure the emails used to say “Good news…” rather than just “News…”. Perhaps the good is now reserved for larger amounts. I don’t know. I’ve not won any.

What I have discovered is that the thrill, excitement and anticipation I used to have on receiving those tickets has been replaced with jaded cynicism. No longer do I wonder if I’m an overnight millionaire, now I just assume £10. The reason is pure and simple. With the exception of one time when I matched 4 numbers and got £60 something I have either received £10 (lotto), £5 (thunderball – which I no longer play) or some pathetic amount like £2.67 (Euromillions, which for me has really been Europence with a total winnings of under £10).

Of late we’ve rather been on a bit of a winning streak with 3 lotto wins (totalling £30) and two Europence wins (totalling just over a fiver) which seems to have turned me into an ungrateful bastard. After all, £35 is better than a swift kick in the teeth and it means we’re only a few quid down on those two months (£9 per month lotto via direct debit and £18 spent on Europence). But no, the green monster looks at the odd couple who won one hundred and something stupid million and seven fucking pence (because when you’re that rich 7p is important) and says “why couldn’t that be us? We have a baby to house and a desperate desire to replace work with a series of five star adventure holidays round the world, we deserve that money!”. I mean, have you seen how much it costs to go on safari in Africa? And I mean properly on Safari, not slumming it. It’s close to £100,000 for a month. That’s not going to happen without a proper Lottery win.

So yes, Camelot have got it right now; it is news about my ticket. Hey ho. There’s always Saturdays draw.

Aft deciding that We Are Going To Rent we promptly had second thoughts. Renting is a pain. It means we could have to move twice in quick succession, which sucks at the best of times, but with a small one in tow is going to be even worse and I just hate the fact that I can do things to the house. That said it’s a temporary measure and I will live pretty much anywhere as long as I have a few basic things¹.

Buying is also awkward. We’re in a God awful limbo whereby tens of thousands of pounds are tied up in other property and yet more money will be coming… at some point². If I could release all of that and go buy somewhere tomorrow we’d be laughing. But we can’t and actual money available for a deposit is small and may need to be used to make Little Cottage fit to rent.

So, our options are:

• Do nothing. Stay in a 1 bedroom house with a little one who lives in the living room.
• Rent and wait for a deposit to either arrive or be saved before buying.
• Buy something cheap temporarily, possibly pushing the budget so we could be asking parents for money if we don’t have rental income one month.
• Sell Little Cottage, almost certainly at a slight loss, but somewhere new with the money that unlocks.
• Sell everything (for a big loss), go buy something (ironically smaller than if we just sold Little Cottage due to lost money) and no longer have multiple mortgages to deal with.
• Sell everything, do a runner, enjoy a year abroad before returning home destitute.

I don’t think selling my flat is really an option so well take that off the table. We’ll know more about the rental and sale potential of Little Cottage on Thursday and in the mean time we’ll just have to continue scouring the rental and property markets. The only thing I assure of from the entire process is that what the meticulous spreadsheet I’ve put together says I should have left in my account each month and what I do have left in the account don’t match. I need to curb my spending :S

¹ Internet, somewhere to set up and play on the play station, that kind of thing
² With some point supposedly last August but actually being any time between tomorrow and… well, whenever really. Could be years.