Spring is with us and there’s no doubt about it. Just a few weeks ago, we were suffering very cold spells and overnight frosts; just three weeks ago, I had to rid my car’s windscreen of ice before I could drive it to work.

Now, we’re basking in sunshine and temperatures of 19°C, rising to 23°C by the end of the week (a good temperature for July over here). This has brought out the daisies and dandelion wet the beds (more later) on the field at the back of Tumpsniffer Towers. The fine weather has also brought out the children and families who play there.

Kids playing football, kids playing cricket. No bother, just enjoying themselves and getting hot and sticky before teatime. There’s no better way of enjoying your evening meal other than red in the face, head pounding, sweaty and covered in dirt and grass stains. Good for them.

On closer inspection, one thing becomes apparent: cricket is played exclusively by the Asian kids; football by the white ones. No black children are there; they’re probably doing their homework under threat of death from their mums.

I wonder why Asian folk don’t seem to play football. Cricket is such a shit sport: five days to play a game; you stop for tea; stop if it goes a bit dark or wet; five days to play a game and you can still get a draw! What sort of nonsense is that? Make them play in the rain, that’d make it a bit interesting at least.

Ongoing sagas
Since starting this blog, I have on numerous occasions, made mention of my long term battle with contact lenses. I got some new ones through the post this weekend. Firstly, I couldn’t tell which one went in which eye because the only information about this was on a label on the box that had been thrown in the bin. When I finally got them the right way round, the prescription on one of them is out and I can’t see too well through it.

My right eye aches like a total bastard because I’ve been squinting all day and now I’m getting a headache.

When the moon hits your eye
This filled me with glee. I always give those face on speed cameras the two fingers, but I wish I could persuade Trump to do this.

Newness
Orange phoned me up today and told me they were changing my tariff and sending me a new phone. Good old Orange.

Dandelion wet the bed
Dandelions make you wet the bed if you touch them.

Down in Norfolkland last week, we had a lovely pudding; something made with rhubarb and polenta and yoghurt (blame Nigella). It was delish. Trump decided she’d make it for our Sunday tea (no main course – straight to the pud), so I was sent on an errand to buy provisions from the supermarket. “Get custard and bio yoghurt”. Those were the instructions.

I was in an unfamiliar supermarket (Morrison’s in Rochdale) and, not knowing where anything was, or whether the natives were hostile, I felt a little flustered. I finally found the custard, or what I thought was custard – the shelf edge label said “creme anglaise”, but the main product logo was obscured by a sticker, but in the trolley it went, along with the other provisions.

We’ve just had our tea and I was a little disappointed with my expensive, creamy, vanilla custard. Investigating, I removed the “Try me free” sticker that had been obscuring the name on the pot and I read it. It dawned on me that we’d been hoodwinked into buying “Nomoo“, a dairy-free alternative to custard. Try me free, I wouldn’t have tried you at all had I known.

FUCKERS!

How dare they call it “Nice vanilla custard” advertise it as creme anglaise, cover up its real name with a fucking sticker and pretend to be high quality custard when it is in fact, crank food for flip flop-wearing Guardianistas, with the information relating to its crankiness being in the tiniest of shitty writing.

Bastards, ruining my tea. I can feel an e-mail coming on. Morrison’s and NoMoo watch out.

Leave it on the table
I love eating out. We went into Manchester yesterday afternoon. It was quite late when we went in and, since it was approaching teatime and since I’d been starving after finishing my lunch, we decided to eat at Croma in the City Centre.

Croma is lovely; with a simple menu of unassuming appetisers, salads, pizzas and pastas. You know what you’re getting when you go to a Croma, and it’s always great quality and a nice environment.

Yesterday was no different, but when my starter arrived, my hunt around the table for the salt pot led me to realise that none of the tables had either salt or pepper. What? Why the hell not? Just put a salt pot and a black pepper grinder on each table, then you don’t have to yell at the busy waiters to get their attention so they can bring them over.

Just put salt and pepper on the bloody table, for fuck’s sake.

And when he brought it over it was a salt mill, not a salt pot. A salt mill with one setting: coarse. Coarse to the point where they might as well have brought the packet of rock salt to the table.

So, to repeat: table salt in a salt shaker; white pepper in a pepper pot; black pepper in a mill.

And dairy products in my fucking custard!

Neighbours are cocks.

All the parking spaces near here were taken up by the usual hoards of visitors to them over the road last night. I ended up parking outside the house of bling with the intention of moving my car, should a space nearer here come available.

One didn’t, and it wasn’t as if the wind chime obsessed bint couldn’t park relatively near to her property when she got back from wherever she’d been, so I started doing bedtime things at 10.30.

At 10.45pm, there was a knock at the door, trump answered.

“Hello, is that your car [reciting some numbers from my registration]? It’s just that it’s parked outside my house. Can you get him to move it?”

“She. She only parked there because people have parked outside our house. And she’s in bed. But there’s nowhere else to park, look”, Trump indicated at the full road outside the house.

“Well, OK, but don’t let it happen again.”

Stupid fucking cunt. Did she really think that I’d parked there for the sake of it? Did she really expect me, or anyone else, to move a car at 11pm? Was it really such a hardship for her to park behind my car?

I hate people round here; they’re all total fucking retards with either no pride in their homes, or so much that they think we all want to appreciate their awful taste in wind chimes and other ridiculous house jewellery.

This is only a fraction of the shite that she hangs from her house, but you get the picture.

When we finally get out of here, those wind chimes are coming down.

And then I’ll burn her house down.

Lesbosians
I see that people from Lesbos are objecting to the word Lesbian being used to describe gay women rather than people emanating from there. They first want its “gay” use to banned in Greece, and then they’ll take on the rest of the world.

Why don’t they just use their common sense and refer to themselves as “Lesbosians”, or even “Fucktards”?

We’re here…

For now at least.

We’re off home again in the morning after spending the past few days here in Norfolk. It’s been nice. Look, the beach at Wells in sunshine!

These things are brilliant for washing the dishes with:

Perhaps not those particular ones, those look a bit rubbish, but the proper ones are ace for doing the pots with. With nice hot water and good washing up liquid, they’re the best things for getting all the mush off your dishes, leaving them squeaky clean. You can use the abrasive edge to take off any dried on food, while the sponge helps the washing detergent foam up, making it go so much further.

On the other hand, these things are totally shit:

Unless they’re absolutely desperate, do people actually use these things to do the washing up? They’re useless! We’ve run out of washing up sponges and we’ve had to resort to dishcloths instead.

Dishcloths have two purposes:

• Cleaning the carpet after one of Rocky’s dirty protests
• Stopping water dripping over the end of the bath

RUBBISH!

But check this out. A whole site devoted to dishcloths; industrial ones! Those stupid, stiff ones that are half sponge, half cloth, wholly crap. You know, those blue and white stripy ones – I think they’re called J Cloths.

They could clear a whole aisle of this shite at Tesco and give it over to things like pickles, gadgets or hair products. I might write them an e-mail.

Cute sushi lunches
Talking of which, I need to contact Tesco about their sushi packaging. They’ve changed the packaging on their large sushi packs so now the plastic tray that the fishiness comes in contains a special little well to mix the wasabe and soy sauce in. Not a bad idea, you’d have thought, except for the fact that you can’t fit any of the bits of sushi into the well to dip into the wasabe.

What’s all that about then? That’s about people meddling unnecessarily, that’s what that is.

Cheeses strings?
What the hell are cheese strings? Are they supposed to be edible? Are they part of some government plot to stunt the development of our youth to prevent them from achieving, thus consigning them to a life on incapacity benefits, a new generation of Labour party voters?

They look awful… and so do the cheese strings.

Why can kids just eat cheese?

Says I, polishing off a packet of Fox’s Viennese Melts. Fuckin’ delish!

You know what it’s like when you’re so tired that it’s a real struggle to even lift your head from the pillow, but you know you have to drag your arse out of bed to go to work because you can’t phone in sick because you have to give a presentation and then when you’re there you desperately want to cancel the contact lens follow-up appointment you’ve made for that evening because you might as well wait until your new specs are ready to pick up so you phone them up to tell them but they tell you that your specs are ready so you might as well go that evening afterall even though you feel like you’re dying and the prospect of sticking contact lenses back in your pisshole eyes makes you feel physically sick?

Well, that’s how I feel.

The combination of lack of sleep, a slight cold, hormones, stresses (good and bad) means that Sniffy is very very tired at the moment.

But why so stressed?

Well, Sniffy has finally, after about five years of trying, FINALLY got a new job, starting in May. This means that I have to do shitty things like handovers to the morons I work with at the moment as well as start picking up new bits of information about the new job. So that’s good stress.

Another good/bad stress is… buying a house. We’re doing a part exchange on Trump’s place for a new build (Bellway). I think we’re getting a good deal. I have no idea about these things. It’s in the hands of solicitors and a financial adviser. I’m keeping my head down until I’m asked to sign a cheque or a contract and once all the savings have gone and the contract is signed, the bad stress will turn into good stress. I am naturally pessimistic and wary of things, especially things involving housing developers and solicitors, but we’ll see how things go.

The return of the neighbourly squeaky chicken
I hope Rocky will be happy in Bellend Towers. He’ll have to encounter something that he’s never had to face before in his short life: doors. HA!

He’s very happy at the moment; having chewed up all his squeaky soft toys so the stuffing has fallen out, I have resurrected his squeaky rubber chicken. I’d forgotten how much he likes it. It is VERY loud and I do hope our neighbours don’t get disturbed by its constant squeaking during the day while we’re out of the house. It would be such a shame if he did anything to piss them off.

On one side, we have the Asian couple with the small children. They’re OK in the main, but it can be a bit annoying being woken up at 4am by the man’s screaming down the phone to somebody in Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad (see, I do know the names of some foreign places outside Europe and North America!). And I’m sure the sofa propped up against their window hasn’t put off any potential purchasers of Trump Towers… no, not at all. Not that we haven’t printed off the information for the FREE PICK UP service from the council and given it to them twice or anything. No, we wouldn’t think of doing anything like that.

On the other side we have Mr and Mrs Fagash and their extraordinarily loud telly. I like the way I can hear what they’re watching in their living room from our bedroom upstairs. I like the way they have a visitor for a couple of hours, but continue to have a ten minute conversation in their open doorway while blowing cig smoke into our house. I love the bloke’s impression of a pig at an abattoir whenever he has an asthma attack in the bedroom adjacent to ours at 1am.

People eh?

15th April 2008
That’s today’s date. On this day last year, it was sunny with a temperature of about 23°C. Today, exactly a year later, it’s about 8°C max, with heavy showers. I had to scrape ice from my car’s windscreen this morning. It’s fucking freezing.

Maybe I’m just fussy, I don’t know, but if I have a salad, there are certain things that just shouldn’t be in it.

Fruit? Absolutely fucking not! I mean, come on, you’re having a nice savoury salad and some tit throws in bits of apple. Idiots.

So that really goes without saying and I think the majority of people with more than one braincell and an ounce of taste would agree with me.

But there are some other things that I cannot abide in salads:

Raw onions
Green, red or yellow peppers
Unpeeled cucumber

Check this out; another offering from Lyle and Shaw…

The salad itself is lovely; fresh mixed leaved, fresh juicy crayfish tails, fresh cherry tomatoes, accompanied with a rather nice Moroccan style dressing. But what the hell is going on with that added mix of what can only be described as NIGHTMARE.

For goodness sake, look at it all.

On delving deeper, I was horrified to find these!

They were quite tasty though.

Virgin
There’s something wonderfully fantastic about a fresh pot of lip balm or hand cream, untouched by anything, not a single mark on its perfect surface.

Beautiful. And yet once that lid is removed, it’s just a matter of time before its surface becomes broken, never to return to its original state.

Never again will that pot of Carmex be whole. Never again will it have that perfect smooth surface.

It’s because of this, that I find myself buying a pot of Carmex every time I see one. I must have ten of the things knocking about at the moment. Lovely.

It comes in tubes as well, but they’re not as much fun.

Twat of the week

I’m not saying anything, but if you want an explanation, click here.

Well, what a weekend! Actually, the weekend started on Thursday evening with an appointment with Stockport’s favourite housewife, Barbara Nice – that’s Barbara as in Streisand, Nice as in the biscuit – at her Hiya and Higher gig at the Lowry.

The thing about the Lowry Centre is that it has several theatres and performance rooms within it and the problem with us was that we ignored the ushers who were asking us which performance we were seeing. So, before finding the theatre that was showing this:

We burst into the theatre that was showing this:

Hey ho. Barbara was brilliant and, not surprisingly, the audience contained a high proportion of poofs. We all know how much we love our mums and an evening with Barbara nice is like spending an evening with your mum on acid.

Friday night we celebrated our 2nd anniversary… awwww. We went for a meal, which was lovely, but a bit pricey. Bloody restaurants using organic fair trade produce; why can’t they just use normal produce and knock 15% off the price? This was followed by a couple of drinks in my favourite gay (lesbian) bar, Coyotes, in the village. The girls who frequent that place clearly love themselves, but this makes it excellent for people watching.

Saturday afternoon
We were pleasantly surprised with a phonecall from our favourite Yorkshire poofs yesterday, telling us that they were heading our way and would we like to meet up for coffee. Of course we would!

So, within a matter of hours of leaving The Village, we were there again and back in the restaurant that charges for organic things when normal food will do.

Piggy was on form, giving us a breakdown on how Tazzy manages to satisfy him despite his tiny manhood.

Honestly, those boys!

Saturday evening
Saturday evening took us to a friend’s for dinner. The friend in question is a colleague of Trump’s and the other guests were also colleagues and friends of Trump’s, with the partner thrown in. Three men, three women.

Rocky came with us.

Rocky isn’t used to seeing men, especially not three at the same time, three gay men at the same time is something he’d never experienced. He tried to have sex with two of them and the other bloke seemed to feel quite left out when Mr Luvvaman wasn’t interested in humping his leg.

I was disgusted that our host even showed the little pup how to snort poppers

But, Rocky was up for it and he couldn’t resist the charms of Salford’s most eligible bachelor.

Dirty bastards, corrupting my little dog.

British Summer Time starts tomorrow. I’m still waiting for the British summer of 2007 to show up, so I don’t hold out much hope of us getting one in 2008.

We lose an hour’s sleep tonight when time jumps magically from 2 to 3am without us evening noticing. Of course, I’ll notice tomorrow morning when I’m tired as a bugger when I wake up, even more sleep deprived than I am already.

I woke early today because of builders clanking and banging as they removed the roof from a neighbouring property… at 7.30. Cunts.

So that was me, in a BAD MOOD.

What should you do when you’re in a bad mood? Something nice? Curl up in your PJs and watch films in bed all day?

That might have been nice. Instead, for some totally fucked up mental aberration, I decided that we should go to the Trafford Centre – on a very rainy, cold Saturday afternoon. It took 20 minutes to find a parking space, let’s just leave it at that.

Eye-eye!

The main reason for putting us through the Trafford Torture was to check out an opticians. Breaking my specs the other week was the catalyst for this – I’m due a sight test in June anyway, so I figured I might as well.

I don’t like having my eyes tested. I dislike any experience that involves me being in extremely close proximity with a virtual stranger, especially youthful, attractive women with low-cut blouses and full cleavages. I found “looking down to the right”, very difficult as this directed my gaze right into her puppies. “Looking down to the right” ended up being “looking down to the right, up, down, left, anywhere but her cleavage!”.

Jeez.

So, having got my breath back, I had to go through the whole “is number one or two clearer”, “is it better with or without” rigmarole. By the time they’ve switched to the alternative lens, I can never remember which is better to tell you the truth, they might as well be testing the eyesight of a goldfish.

Anyway, it turns out that I’m blind and I need new specs. Bloody expensive things.

The Orphanage

We’re off to a late showing of The Orphanage in a bit. I’m scared already.