Being rapidly approaching 30, my memories only really stretch back as far as my mid twenties now. Memories that I do have of before that time are probably not actually real, but have been implanted in my head by whichever droid is controlling my mind. Potentially...

With this in mind, this blog is actually quite useful, most notably the archive section, which dates back well over 4 years now. In just a few minutes I can relive my mid-twenties in glorious black and white text, with all the fucks and bollocks I used to describe those interesting times.

It's so strange how everything has moved on - I just read an entry from July 2004 where I had just parted company with my Fast Track scheme, was single, poor and renting a small flat near the local smackhouse / brothel. 4 years on, and I'm happily attached, 3 years into a mortgage, and managing a team of people at Heathrow stopping baddies from smuggling drugs, exactly how I had planned it! 2004 just doesn't seem real anymore. Sure I have some memories of it all, but it just all seems such a long time ago - like a different lifetime or something.

Really really strange feeling, but all brought back to life by reading my old entries on here!

For those who haven't seen me lately, I'm 1 week away from hopefully being out of the plaster cast that has been lurking on my left wrist for the past 5 weeks, following a footballing injury. Just hope everything's healed up as planned, because there is only so much time you can spend in a cast before it starts to rather get on your tits a little. And 5 weeks is way past that time...

The cast hasn't stopped me trying to get all the building / decorating works finished though. Did some tiling of the kitchen floor this evening, having spent most of this afternoon scraping the old lino off the floor, which had seemingly been stuck down by a substance fifty times as strong as gravity, and let to rot for 30 years. The tiling itself was fairly straightforward - admittedly I only got as far as 7 tiles, and none of them needed cutting down to size, but I'm sure I can do the rest of the room over the next few days if I really put my mind to it. Honest.

The house has looked like a shit-tip for the last 3 months now, mainly due to furniture being constantly moved around, and walls being knocked down etc, so we're desperate to get it all finished now so that we can get back to a semblance of normality. There's only so long I can live like a pig before I start growing a curly tail and grunting (even more than usual).

Maybe in another 4 years time I'll look back at this entry and it will invoke those exciting memories of DIY, filth, sweat and plaster casts that I've become so fond of. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all...

My addiction to buying crap off eBay will surely end in my eventual downfall. One day I will either be too poor to afford food, or my house will be so full of shite that I will be wedged between said shite and be unable to escape the confines of my bedroom.

Today, my wireless stereo headphones arrived from Hong Kong (where else?!?!). They are quite cool in that you can listen to music from the PC, Hi-Fi or TV wirelessly from up to 20 meters away. You can see the attraction surely?! However, although they are undeniably cool, they look like something that has broken off the Mir Space Station. But much bigger. And with a rather bizarre aerial sticking out of them.

I have fairly high self-esteem, but even I think I look like an arsehole when I look in the mirror now. An arsehole who looks like a robotic version of Mickey Mouse.

What else arrived today? Oh yes, my 5th pair of novelty cufflinks within the last 2 weeks. Admittedly they were all fairly cheap, but considering I only have 1 shirt that takes cufflinks, the practicality of this investment could be somewhat questionable.

What can you do eh....

For the love of all things good in the world, where has the last three years gone?! Back in May 2004 I decided to start writing this blog, purely through my love of bandwagons, and as a release for my rapidly stagnating creative juices.

A lot has changed in the last 3 years, pretty much all of which has been for the best. As the great social poet, Robert Williams once wrote, 'No regrets - they don't work', I'm always inclined to go along with that wherever practical and it seems to have stood me in pretty good stead over the years. 

My creative juices have a slight crust on them these days, but do still manage to flow occasionally, albeit with a somewhat treacle-like consistency about them. This time next year I'll be half a year away from 30, which has started to creep up like the proverbial invisible fox (someone needs to write a proverb about an invisible fox methinks).

Having said that, the future is still bright. I guess it just all depends on what angle you look at it from....

The other evening I went down to the Oakford Social in town with a few mates that were in town as it was coming up to Easter Weekend. I was just on the Red Bulls as I had it in my mind that I needed to drive to Tescos afterwards to get some shopping in before the missus came round the following day!

Evening went well, and was topped off by some live music, which always seems to be going on in the Oakford and is normally quite annoying at times! But that evening Laura Marling was playing. We didn't know at the time, but she has been signed by Virgin and is about to release an EP, and she is / was bloody brilliant! She's got a fantastic voice, plays the guitar writes good songs.

And, most importantly, she's a Reading girl! 

There's a few of her songs dotted about the web if you look hard enough for them. She's also got a Myspace page with some tracks on it, which can be found here. 

There's not always a plethora of great things coming out of Reading, so this is definitely one to look out for over the coming months....

Back in the heady days of 2006 I bought a pressure washer from B&Q. Only a cheap one mind. As soon as I bought one, Thames Water brought in a hosepipe ban, which meant I couldn't use it to clean the patio as I had intended.

So for nearly a year it has sat in its box prepped and ready for action. Like a coiled spring. A caged tiger. A sex-craved teen. 

And yesterday I removed it from its box. Two trips to B&Q later I had the plastic bits required to attach it to a hose pipe. A further trip to the parents later I had a further hose to connect it to the tap in the games room.

And a few hours of wrist action later I had two nice shiny patios, muddy legs and a stiff neck. Really quite a rewarding experience on reflection. A shinier patio I have not seen. You could eat your dinner off it. Admittedly I'm not planning to, but at least the option is there.

So how does this relate to nuts, you may ask? 

Well it doesn't. Not at all really. Good title though methinks.

But whilst on the subject of nuts, I am currently playing nut Russian roulette. A recent trip to the Cadbury's seconds shop resulted in two bags of 'Mis-Shapes' being brought home. In case you are unfamiliar Mis-Shapes are bags of Cadbury's chocolates that went wrong in the factory. Only very minor superficial wrong, rather than death-inducing wrong, but wrong none-the-less.

So you get a bag of different chocolate shapes, unwrapped, with no indication of what they are. As you can imagine, for someone with a mild nut allergy this isn't ideal, as some appear to contain hazelnuts.

By a process of elimination I managed to work out which shapes I thought had the nuts in. But, in their extreme craftiness, Cadbury's slipped a few hazelnuts into the non-nut ones as well, just to piss me off. So every now and then the solid chocolatey goodness is invaded by a large white thing hiding in the middle.

If chocolate wasn't so damn tasty, this would be a thankless task, I must surmise....