A Good Butchers

Appropriately as its National Bike Week I’m on my bike today.

I wonder if this means they’ll be an amnesty this week on the attempted assassinations of cyclists. I take the hilly route to work today, to test the old legs out. As I sit at the Balloon Wood traffic lights I look back at the Chelsea Tractor that has pulled up behind me to try to ascertain, as I usually do, whether they’ve seen me or not and therefore whether they will attempt to drive over the top of me, when the lights change, or not. The female driver seems to be still getting dressed. Then she glares at me as if it’s my fault for noticing! She doesn't appear to realise that she’s not worth wasting an eyeball on. Well at least I now know that she’s seen me, whether this means she will still attempt to drive over the top of me or not, I’m not sure.

If you think this is all rather a lot to notice as I simply wait for a set of lights to change, let me tell you that the Balloon Wood traffic lights have five roads that intersect and they take an age to change. Enough time to have a good butchers around, or in fact to finish getting dressed.

It’s quite hot again today and this mini heatwave causes us a bit of a dilemma at work where the computers and the sun heat up the office very quickly. Our air conditioning, despite numerous temperature and fan settings, effectively has only two modes, on or off. ‘Off’ means that in this weather you can pretty soon fry an egg on the top of one of the laser printers, whereas the ‘on’ setting cools the office down so fast that within ten minutes we can have snow falling inside the office, which really clogs up your keyboard. A setting in between, however, seems to elude it.

An email entitled 'What the crap' appears in my inbox. Must be Daughter. She’s been having problems with the 'content lock' feature on the 'stupid brilliant piece of junk', that's her affectionate nickname for her phone. It’s stopped her from using Meebo, well it has got a daft name, because she can't confirm her age as being over 18 because, well she isn’t over 18 and hasn't got a credit card number to prove it. I think she wants to borrow mine.

Now it’s blocked her from accessing the La Senza website... and why not, you don’t want all these youngsters viewing websites which have photographs of ladies in their underwear do you. Even if she did only want to see how expensive their socks were. Oh well, and she can't even go on Meebo to bitch about it.

I access ‘my’ online account for the phone, it’s all registered in my name, where I can see everything she’s been up to on it. Cool. Big Parent is watching you... Whilst I’m there I unlock the thing for her, now she surf as much porn as she likes.

My opponent took some time to decide whether we play squash or tennis this week, after his defeat last time. So long in fact, that I doubt now that we would get a squash court at such short notice. So tennis it is, the only proviso he says, is that the first ten-year-old girl who walks past, laughs and says her younger sister could hit the ball harder than that, we are off the court. So that's the rules decided, may the tippy-tapping commence.

I actually try to play some shots and wins some points this week, rather than just tapping it back to my opponent for him to make the mistakes. It’s a glorious failure. So back to plan A next time.