Firetop

Saturday evenings are sometimes a weekly ‘baby escape’ for Suzie_Q and I, a time when our babysitting in-laws kindly take charge of listening to the baby monitor for the night. This week, having successfully ventured to Dorking and Guildford in the past month, we thought we’d really push the boat out… and go to Redhill - the town we first lived in together. We began our evening at ‘The Sun’ (a Wetherspoons pub) and reminisced about how every Friday it used to be full of deaf people busily signing to each other, odd really that they should have chosen the only non-music playing establishment to do that, since presumably anywhere would have been OK in even the loudest environment? It was after perhaps fifteen minutes in the Sun that we suddenly realised we had changed an awful lot this year what with the wedding and becoming parents - unfortunately it seems we have become responsible adults. (more…)

On Saturday evening Suzie_Q and I had the in-law babysitters in place and, with Maria now sleeping through the night, we felt safe to venture a bit further afield. I went online and found an Italian restaurant in central Guildford called Da Gennaro. Upon discovering their website to be up-to-date I gambled on a table reservation - if a website is being updated then some reasonably professional enterprise must be behind it (in my opinion). Gnocchi was also on the menu - this was the main thing to draw us in, you can’t find that anywhere in Dorking except Sainsbury’s! (more…)

This week I have unfortunately been rather ill - hence the lack of postings, it’s been quite inconvenient considering that I’m four weeks into a new job and have a new baby at home. Ironically both of these factors may well have influenced my illness as stress does play a big part in my own IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), but it mainly all began with a food poisoning incident four weeks ago which upset the bodily balance. Not many people like to blog about digestive disorders as it’s a slightly embarrassing subject, but most web pages on the subject are not very helpful; everything seems to be a rip off of the same source for the purpose of generating a bit of contextual ad revenue - a theme I’ve noticed with a lot of medical sites. (more…)

This year I made quite some effort to grow our own vegetables in the garden; lettuces and beetroot have been very successful, I also had high hopes for my tomato plants. Unfortunately, having freed my biggest plants from the confines of their plastic greenhouse covering, they soon went brown, dried up and died… closely followed by my batch of outdoor plants residing not too far away. It seems that with all the wet weather we’ve been having, combined with moderate warmth, it’s been the perfect climate for Tomato Blight (Phytophthora infestans) to do its worst. I took some photographs as the web seems to be lacking for confirmation of Blight symptoms. (more…)

Six months after my first article about the use of Clubscan to scan the driving licences of all drinkers at the Rat and Parrot in Crawley, the news of my petition surfaced on the front of The London Metro newspaper today. It seems James Brokenshire (MP for Hornchurch and Shadow Home Affairs Minister) has heard about what’s going on with software like Clubscan and raised some concerns publicly. Yesterday I was contacted by the Metro news desk and asked for my thoughts – today I was quoted in the Metro. (more…)

I’ve always found Gordon Brown’s strange chin dropping action as he inhales to be quite irritating, even Rory Bremner with his great attention to detail has never been shy of imitating the jaw drop at the start of each sentence. I noticed yesterday that during his first Prime Ministerial speech outside Number Ten, the ‘chin thing’ had gone. I was quite pleased, I’m guessing that Gordon’s had some coaching on that and been told to close his mouth promptly at the end of each statement. Whilst seeking out a picture of the old chin in action, I came across something far more disturbing - a video of Gordon Brown seemingly picking his nose and eating the contents whilst seated in the House of Commons. (more…)

This morning Suzie_Q and I were up relatively early (for us) and so we headed down to the breakfast café on the corner of West Street. You can always guarantee yourself satisfying full English there (if they’re actually open). Upon arriving in West Street I noticed that there were signs up announcing ‘West Street Festival - Today, 10am to 5pm‘ - “How exciting” I thought “A bit of entertainment for us”. At 10am when we left the cafe with full bellies there was very little sign of a festival; one or two of the ‘always empty’ antiques shops had some coloured bunting adorning their shop fronts, at the end of the street a woman beneath a gazebo selling what looked like straw hand bags - and that was it! (more…)

On bank holiday Monday we took the new ‘family size’ Peugeot 307sw for it’s first long drive down to Bexhill-on-Sea, picking up some family members along the way. My grandparents (Jack and Vera… yes they were a real life couple!) lived in Bexhill for most of my childhood and, with the eight year anniversary of my Grandfather’s passing coming up, we visited his grave which was surrounded by bright blooming flowers. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t too good down in East Sussex, a strong wind meant I had to hold on tight to my Gran to stop her blowing over, she managed her usual ‘you’ll be burying me here soon’ joke none-the-less though, before we all piled back into the car and grabbed some lunch. (more…)

On Friday evening, after celebrating the birthday of a colleague with drinks at the Island Queen Pub in Islington (no it wasn’t a gay Hawaiian pub), I was pretty hungry when I got back to Dorking at 11:35pm. I phoned my wife to see if she might be able to pick me up at the station, but she was wavering on making me get a cab… until I threw a Kebab offer in. Being five months pregnant Suzie_Q has an enormous appetite right now, the arrival of food is celebrated like Christmas morning by an excited child, I knew a Kebab offer would get me a lift home! (more…)

On Saturday evening Suzie_Q and I went for drinks in Crawley to celebrate my cousin’s belated birthday, our destination was the Rat and Parrot pub. We’ve been there before, it’s a bit on the rough side with clientele that probably wouldn’t look out of place at ‘The Jockey’ in TV’s Shameless; it lacks character, the staff seem to deliberately ignore you at the bar and it would be very easy to inadvertently get into a fight. When we arrived at the Rat and Parrot the doormen were checking ID, when we presented them with our driving licenses both sides were scanned into a laptop. “What’s that for?” I asked the bouncer, to which he replied in a deep voice “So if there’s any trouble we can find out”, “Where’s the data stored?” I asked… “Oh it’s just for Crawley you know, to check nobody has been banned.” I was slightly disconcerted by the fact my ID had been scanned and stored without my permission by somebody who didn’t seem to fully understand why. (more…)