You are allowed to enjoy this…

I made waffles. This is the first time I’ve made waffles. The Missus bought me a new sandwich toaster which also doubles as a waffle grill. The outside of the toaster/waffle grill gets hotter than the inside. Something is afoot.

I digress. Here are my waffles…

Now the punchline to this entry reads as if it is made up, as if I am putting it down purely for comic effect, but I can assure you, dear reader, that the following exchange did happen yesterday evening.
The new place we are renting was the refuge of what I call an enthusiastic DIY-er. Now I have strong opinions about DIY and they go something like this: DON’T. There are some people who do a great job at home maintenance, but my experience is most do an half-arsed job of things and over the years I’ve become a bit “OCD” about screws. Yes, screws. In my previous home, the owner had taken the trouble (either by design or incompetence) to make sure that every single screw in every single fitting was odd – so you’d have screws of various shapes, sizes and colours holding the door handles on, etc.
Every time I sat down to have the morning movement, I was greeted by the sight of four odd screws gleaming back at me, taunting me, offending my vision with a symbolic one-fingered salute that was in my own mind. I mean, who would do such a thing? Why would anyone do such a half-arsed job? Not even myself could come up with such a scheme. I’m no handyman but I have a collection of different screws and nails in my little toolbox that I could approximate a similar screw. Heck, there’s always the local ironmonger or DIY store to help you with uniformity of your metalwork.
You can imagine the relief when the car smashed into the shop, it was an ideal excuse to get everything changed (at our own expense, I might add – there was no big compensation pay-out for the likes of us, no insurance scam, just the bare minimum to get by, etc). And so, we paid for all those little niggles to be wiped away. And no more was my sight offended by four odd screws to every fitment.
And so you can imagine my dismay when we arrived at the new home to find that the previous owner had a similar mental tick. Only this time it wasn’t odd screws, it was missing screws. Yes, you look at a door handle and there is one missing screws (or a combination of odd screws), and the handle to the back door is held on by two solitary screws. Another half-arsed DIY fanatic.
Also, every fitting wobbles or appears to be hanging on by sheer will power. We have shelves that teeter, and three shelves that are up so high that only I can reach them on tip-toes – and I’m six-foot in stockinged feet (though the last time i wore stockings was when I was ten years old – don’t ask). The person responsible is a moron and I want to smack him hard in the back of the head until he regains some sense or at least employs the services who can do the job properly. The irony (geddit?) was that a Screwfix Direct catalogue greeted us on the doorstep when we moved in so I should have read this as a portent of things to come.
The previous night, The Missus was putting some items on one of the shelves in the kitchen when it collapsed. On inspection, the whole thing was held up by four small pieces of plastic, three of which had sheered off and caused the collapse. Last night, we were discussing the incident and I offered to blow the dust from my tool box and make the repair, putting four replacement screws in place in order to hold up the shelf.
“Can I watch Daddy screw?” asked Verity in a loud bright voice.
Let’s just say the conversation ended there with us both raising our eyebrows and glad that the vicar hadn’t called around for evening tea.
Trust me, no one in their right mind wants to watch Daddy screw for I am just an enthusiastic amateur.

They were words that struck fear into my heart. How were we going to move on from this? How would this pan out in the future?

“When I am old enough I am going to get a tattoo, like Jim…” said Verity at bedtime last night.

She was always fascinated by the couple of tattoos Jim had on his arm and keeps wanting me to take her into the tattoo parlour we pass on our daily walks. Verity is only three and a half years old.

What the hell am I going to do when she is fifteen???

Somehow I feel I am on a hiding to nothing…

Verity is going to the hairdressers at the weekend for her first ever proper hair cut. She has decided that the hairdresser will be her new best friend.

“Daddy, you aren’t my best friend anymore,” she said having decided on a replacement, “I am going to take you to the meadow and leave you with the cows.”

To me, this sounded as if it came from the same school of euphemism as the kind of rhetoric you hear in a mafia movie – “He’s going to sleep with the fishes.” For a moment, a chill ran through me and then we moved onto the next subject of conversation.

Kids, ain’t they marvellous?

In an attempt to re-continue my life back on the blog, it seems only fair to provide an update on our resident oversized Westie, Alex the Wonderdog. Unfortunately, life hasn’t been to kind to Alex of late and he’s been suffering from all manner of ear and eye infections. We think this maybe down to his skin condition, but the vet’s don’t seem to have any idea what the problem is.
During the last week’s of our exile, I was treating him for a bad eye infection and adminstering eye drops and ear drops which virtually rendered him deaf and blind. Everything appeared to clear up, but last week, after the move, we noticed that there was something very wrong with his left eye.

Getting an appointment back at our old vet, it was diagnosed that he had some kind of cyst on his eye. The condition was serious and more eye drops prescribed. After a couple of doses, whatever this cyst was, burst, and he resembled something from a Hammer Horror movie.

Tonight, was a return visit to the vet and the prognosis was not good. If we are lucky we might be able to save the eye, but he won’t see out of it properly. If we are unlucky he’ll lose it. As a sidenote, the vet said that he couldn’t prescribe any steroid eye drops at this moment in time as they would probably cause the eye to burst.

That really turned my stomach!!!

Poor old Alex – the treatment over past few days has cost us shy of £150. Don’t have pets and kids – they are expensive, smell and generally shit up the place. (Of course, I jest)

…is the hate mail.

Of course, the majority of our ex-customers were sweet, charming and kind people who paid their bills on time, some were not. The one thing I found dealing with the inhabitants of that village was that there was a nasty streak of intolerance that ran through their genetic makeup. Maybe it was because they lived in a semi-rural backwater with no prospects and no chance of ever bettering themselves. Perhaps it was that they were so closely related to each other that even the simple task of breathing exhausted their poor, befuddled, inbred minds.

I don’t know. I don’t want to know. All I know is that every so often one of these dolts would rise up, do their best to express their thoughts on the page and then post said letter to us. This would often be accompanied by a cancellation of their papers and a debt unpaid to “show us a lesson”. Yeah, whatever. The silly sods might think they were teaching me a lesson but I invariably wrote off the debt and claimed it back via the tax man at the end of the tax year. In the end, the debt gets paid.

So the first exhibit in this rogues gallery (I’ve actually lost a couple of the corkers when that car crashed into the shop), is a letter from someone who missed a newspaper. Now this happens and this often happens when you employ a new delivery boy. It also happens in the winter when the boys haven’t properly woken up. It also happens when they fall in love and are consumed with soppy thoughts. A newspaper delivery boy in love is no use to anyone and so we just used to have them put down humanely with a bolt gun – the same device they use on cows at the slaughterhouse down the road. <---- JOKE

In this instance, a newspaper boy failed and instead of us being informed and the problem being dealt with in a sensible way, the customer involved took pen to paper. They also didn’t pay their bill. Boy did they teach me a lesson!

One of the people who lived at that address where that letter originated and where we (albeit unsucessfully on two occasions) delivered newspapers ended up going to prison for a long time for kiddie fiddling, I kid you not… God pays debts without money.

Now the next letter relates to a skirmish with an employee and the opposing version of the story (the shop version, if you please) was that the customer was very rude and very rude about the paper boy involved and so our employee made the irate customer wait his turn after he tried jumping the queue.

Read on, dear reader…

The thing about having a large credit-based business is that you have to come up with new ways of encouraging people to pay. I used to send bills out every week, but I was spending so much on paper, self-seal envelopes and printer supplies that I decided to charge for the bills. This was a two-fold effort: to avoid a bill they would pay on time, and then I would also recoup my costs. Some people were not amused…and told me so.

Firstly, don’t think that there is any real profit to be made in newspapers. You get roughly 25% of the cover price back – so for a 30p Sun newspaper, I’ll make about 7p. It’s hardly enough to make Rockerfeller raise an eyebrow. So it is a misnomer to think that we were coining it in.

I also quickly discovered that many people who complained were either sons of newsagents (in the two letters above, both people involved were sons of newsagents and yet they only lived three doors apart. What a small world!) or they had owned a business in the past. And these people would fill themselves to the brim with piss and vinegar in order to tell you exactly how wrong you were running the business. Ahhhh, yes, I will miss that a lot.

But meeting the great unwashed was an eye-opener. I’ve heard all the excuses why people can’t pay. Some can’t figure out that if you don’t pay for a newspaper for nine weeks, your bill will start to reach the £70 mark. Some will blame their drink problem. One person couldn’t pay because they had to pay for a grave stone.

Oh what happy memories…