Dom Davis (The Blog)

…summer is back It’s a gorgeous day out there and it’s the start of The Weekend™. Unfortunately The Zozo doesn’t have any days off this weekend to share it with her (assuming we’re getting more than just an afternoon of this) which is an arse.

Blue skies and the office bathed in sunshine as I get to leave it for a couple of days of freedom

This year is the first year I’ve been about for Cromer Carnival which is a week of festivities including the crowning of the Carnival queen ¹ (Saturday), airshow² (yesterday), fireworks (tonight) and fairground (all week). I believe it’s one of the larger carnivals in North Norfolk.

Last night was the big parade. Cromer is closed to traffic and floats, bands, dancers and becostumed people paraded along the streets to throngs of happy, cheering and quite tipsy people. The Zozo and I went out to see this spectacle, eat burgers, hotdogs and doughnuts and generally join in with the revelry.

Being my first carnival I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was very impressed by the quality of the floats and costumes. I was also stunned by the number of young girls in leotards twirling batons. Either they were imported from round the county or Cromer has the highest number of twirlers per capita of anywhere in the world.

Parade over the Zozo and I investigated the fun fair and the Zozo treated me to a few goes shooting prizes with cork guns (she won 3 prizes, I only managed 1) and a go throwing surprisingly light balls at clearly weighted cans. Neither of us won a prize although I managed to cheat and catch the ball on a rebound without anyone seeing giving me a fourth shot. Didn’t help

We went to sleep that night with full bellies, smiles on our faces and the sounds of revelry drifting on the night air. All in all a great evening.

¹ which was more of an afterthought after the long and boring speeches by local dignitaries
² the Red Arrows pitch up and do their thang. I missed that unfortunately

I’m very picky when it comes to watches to the point where they’re one of the few items I won’t buy off the internet. I need to see the exact size and how it looks in the flesh.

Having worn Fossil ‘Big Tick’ watches for about a decade I decided to go out on a limb and try something new. My first attempt met with abject failure. I broke my cardinal rule, bought something from the internet and never really got on with it. In the end I went back to wearing my old Fossil.

Eventually, however, the battery died. The display was broken (which is why I was wanting to replace it in the first place) and I had to go get a new watch. Deciding to just replace like with like I just headed to google for somewhere to buy a new Big Tick. The results page flashed up a number of results and some images for a new ceramic watch by Fossil. First impressions were that it was something I’d like, but I needed to be sure the face wasn’t too big.

That lunch I headed into Norwich and scoured every shop that sold watches for this thing. No joy. Eventually I ended up in House of Fraser where, after a long chat with the person in charge of watches, I discovered the watch I wanted would require special order and, worse still, was likely to be too big.

Since they didn’t have the watch in question we had been using other watches as examples and one had particularly taken my eye. Assuming it was going to cost a fortune (most ceramic watches I’d seen that day were hideously expensive) I made a throwaway comment about how I’d love that one but couldn’t afford it. With that the sales person pounced.

Knowing how much I was willing to pay for the Fossil I had come in about I was offered an ex-display model of the watch I liked heavily discounted (Hurrah for sales!). The only downside was the battery might need replacing sooner and there were no spare links. Given the watch was just a bit too large and I’d need a link removed I didn’t see that as a problem. I left the proud owner of a hideously expensive watch at a not so hideously expensive price. I was a very happy chap. So pleased was I with my watch I even bought a matching ring.

Now is probably a good time to mention one of the properties of ceramic watches (and rings for that matter): they’re very brittle and won’t survive a drop onto a hard surface. You can guess what’s coming next

Yup, this morning a bleary eyed me picked up a bunch of papers that also happened to be hiding my watch. In trying to work out what the heavy lump in amongst everything was I managed to drop the watch on the floor breaking two of the links. I was gutted.

Thankfully it was just the two links that broke and not the watch itself. Sadly I only have one spare link so I need a second. This will require sending it to the authorised UK service place and have them repair it. They won’t give estimates of repairs to ceramic watches until they’ve seen the damage which sounds expensive. All I can do is send it off and see what they say. Fingers crossed for good (and cheap) news.

So as a coda to the stag do, which is handily happening on a Saturday evening in London, I decided I’d go to Slimelight one last time. As previously mentioned this is going to require some planning, but I think I’ve covered all angles.

Getting to London won’t be an issue as I’ll be there already for the stag.

Organisation of people is easy. The Best man has been informed (with YouTube examples) of the type of music, the dress code (there is one, and it’s quite strict) and the fact that this is not part of the official stag do. People can either come, or not. Their choice. I plan to be there all night.

Which leads us to the big question mark. Will I last all night? I’ve got this covered too. Since I now have the body of a professional sportsman¹ I’ve moved out of the ‘fat burning zone’ and into the ‘cardio training zone’² at the gym. Still, even with my training regime general fatigue and tiredness may be my undoing, bedtime is 9pm these days after all. Should the land of nod beckon then there is a hotel room booked where I can crash and die.

Even the problem of will I be needing a train a club chuck out time or hotel checkout time had been solved, although using brute force over ignorance. Booking the train well in advance means it’s l not hugely expensive so I can afford to have seats booked on two trains.

Not quite as simple (or cheap) as when I lived in Colchester but as a one off I think it’s a pretty fool proof plan. Be interesting to see how well it holds out on the day

¹ Darts player
² No, I don’t have a clue the difference is either, I just assume one makes you thinner quicker and the other helps you get used to going for longer.

I’ve always enjoyed clubbing and have been a regular patron of a few dark and dingy holes in my life. I go clubbing to dance which means, unlike most people, I go sober [duff kidneys] and alone¹. Given the latter I need to be damn sure there is going to be decent music because a night of watching pissed people dance to crap music is bad enough when drunk and in a group. I also like the patrons to be older because being the only non member of staff in their 30s is a bit tragic. Mix those requirements with my taste in music and these days I’m limited to about 3 clubs in the UK which means I just cut to the chase, go to London and patronise the grandaddy of them all: Slimelight. 8+ hours of terror EBM, agrotech, power noise, darkwave and just a soupçon of goth with the odd bit of industrial, coldwave and 80s cheese thrown in for good measure (you’ve just got to love alternative genre names ).

Since Slimelight is open all night I used to get a train from Colchester at about 10pm, get there for just gone 11, dance the night away, leave at 7:30am, get the tube back to Liverpool Street, catch the first train home and die. Readers of my old blog may even remember the entries written in an attempt to stay awake after a night out.

In those days I was younger, single, unemployed and only an hour or so away from London. These days I have a fiancée, a job and live 3 hours from London. Not only is going to Slimelight a marathon effort but it also cuts into precious Zozo time and would leave me dead for a week (unless I had Monday off to recover too). Sadly I think my clubbing days are over and it’s time to hang up the glowsticks, put away the black tshirts with fluorescent slogans and leave the dancing for family events in the future where I can embarrass the kids.

In order that I go out with a bang rather than a whimper I’ll be heading to Slimelight one last time for a post stag dance-a-thon, the details of which are a topic for another entry.

¹ I don’t know many (any?) people who would really want to go to the clubs I go to and I’ve found people to be notoriously unreliable come 11pm on a Saturday as they’ve generally been drinking. Much easier to go alone and tell people who might be interested where you’ll be if they want to show up. That way they can also head off with the people they came with if they don’t like it and not ruin my night

However many years ago it was I last saw my urologist he told me I had a small kidney stone on the right hand side. It wasn’t doing much so he suggested we leave it and see what happened. There are two ways this stone can leave my body: naturally and artificially. Passing a stone smarts a little and it’s the kind of thing you notice. I’ve not passed the stone. lithotripsy, ureteroscopy and other artificial methods of getting rid of stones are also not the kind of thing that would go unnoticed so I think we can safely say I still have a stone.

These days I no longer have the fancy health insurance with the Harley Street urologists and am dependent on the NHS who, while great at scooping you up off the floor and getting you going again, can be a bit slow for non urgent things. If we remember I rocked up to A&E on valentines day complaining of a kidney stone. They x-rayed me, gave me some nice painkillers (although not the really nice ones) and sent me home with the message that they’d be in touch.

A few months later I got a letter saying I’d been referred to a consultant and that they wanted to give me a CT scan. CT scans are much more fun than X-Rays (and infinitely more fun than IVUs which are basically a legal form of diagnostic torture) so that was cool. Then I had to go speak to the consultant (pitch up to outpatients, wait for over an hour) to be told the CT was inconclusive and they wanted to do another CT. Could have been done by letter, but at least I was being processed. CT the second was a few weeks ago.

Today I got a letter from my consultant. Turns out I have a kidney stone. It’s not moved since the first CT and they’d like to remove it. Apparently they are now able to see the kidney stone on my original X-Ray “now that they know what they’re looking for”. Clue was in the “I have a kidney stone in my right hand side”, but there you go, at least they found this one (they’re now 2 for 5).

I’m now on a waiting list for a rather fun little procedure where they shove a laser up your… well, lets just say they put you to sleep and when you wake up there’s no stone and it hurts like hell to pee. This is an overnight job which will then involve a couple of days recovery. Why am I telling you all this? Well basically I will require VAST amounts of sympathy during the recovery time and I want you all to be prepared.

People handle grief differently. I tend to be very private with my grief getting through the more public parts of the day by listening to very loud, very aggressive music and eating crap. Since I couldn’t be there I marked my grandmothers funeral today by stuffing my face with one of those individually wrapped portions of Cadburys Fruit and Nut (the 200 gram one so it’s more than 1 mouthful).

I’ve eaten a lot of crap this week so the diet should probably begin again in ernest tomorrow. That said, I am a lot happier with my shape these days and I did notice the other day that I had the body of an Athlete¹ so that’s OK.

¹ OK, so maybe not the body of an athlete, but I do have the feet of an athlete at least… OK, OK, I have athletes foot. Happy now?

Blam!

The alarm shocks you from blissful slumber to bleary eyed consciousness. Clinging at the desperate belief that, somehow, an extra 60 seconds in bed will make all the difference you delay the inevitable as long as you can. Eventually, resigned to your fate, you can put it off no longer. Trying to peel your eyes open you stumble into the bathroom trying to work out how, after 8 hours sleep, you’re more tired than when you went to bed.

Ablutions done and with the shower having had very little effect you head downstairs to prepare breakfast and lunch only to discover you’ve left the fridge open all night and nothing is cold anymore. Spreading half melted butter on your sandwich you contemplate toast for breakfast instead of cereal with warm milk, but no, you decide to be good.

Taking the cereal out of the cupboard in it’s plastic container you tip it upside down like you do every day to mix the large and small bits together but somehow today you’ve completely failed to hold onto the lid and there is now half a box of Alpen strewn over the work surface and floor. With a sigh you retrieve the dustpan and bush and tidy up before retiring to eat breakfast.

Having to clean up the mess has made you late. You have to rush your tea and head out the door to go to work. The Zozo is off today and you don’t want to go. You want to stay home with her. As you head to the station wondering what else is going to go wrong today the rain pipes up: “Remember me?” it says, “and you don’t have your big brolly with you either, what a shame!”

Cue a short, sharp cloudburst.

The area at the front of Little Cottage is little more than a gravel drive giving access to the houses past ours. Getting a car up it is impractical so we use our bit to store the bins, hang the washing out, keep pot plants and, recently, somewhere to keep The Zozos bird table.

The bird table is a rather neat arrangement of large bird bath below and bird house and feeding area above made to look like it’s made from greening metal. Since it’s not actually made from metal it’s only really meant for smaller birds and not, say, pterodactyls. In fact the box clearly states “Unsuitable for larger birds, pterodactyls, dragons or other wyrms”¹.

Yesterday the bird table clearly suffered pterodactyl strike (can’t have been a dragon, there’s naff all room for them to manoeuvre and a complete lack of scorch marks) resulting in the loss of a fat ball and serious structural damage. This is not good. Replacing it is not going to be easy either. Clearly the new one will have to be able to withstand extinct creatures but there is also the local environment to consider.

The geography outside the front of our house means that when it’s windy we get serious gusts of wind. Enough to rip washing from lines, blow over clothes horses and knock over fully grown adults¹. Clearly whatever we buy must be stable and easy to fix in place. Which leads me to the next problem.

The gravel drive sits on about 1″ of soil which in turn sits on a substrate of diamond¹ which makes putting fixing things into the ground very hard. I bent all the metal fixing pins on the other bird table trying to drive them into the ground.

Of course, as always, the Internet will prevail and I’m sure we’ll find something suitable.

¹ True story^2
2OK, maybe a little exaggerated

A month or two ago we had rain of biblical proportions which managed to soak me entirely despite having a brolly. I don’t seem to have blogged about it though which is remiss of me. I certainly bitched about it on Facebook a lot. Anyway, the upshot is that these days I take my bigger umbrella if it looks like more than showers. So consider this morning:

Me: Good morning rain!
Rain: Good morning Dom.
Me: You’re going to piss it down aren’t you?
Rain: *looks innocent*
Me: Well I don’t trust you so I’m taking my big umbrella!
Rain: As you wish.
Me: Yup, see, lovely and dry!
Rain: You sure about that?

[Cue more biblical rain that hits the ground so hard it then bounces up and soaks you from the thighs down.]

Me: Bastard!
Rain: You’re welcome.

Thankfully the point was proved on the quick 250m dash to the station so I was able to go from soaked to damp by the time I arrived in Norwich and was not made any damper on my walk to work. Poor old Zozo was out in it all day though