Nottingham Riviera

I’m in the car today which is a shame as the weather seems to be holding up well. It's great cycling weather. We should be in for a good weekend, we are down in Devon for a few days from tomorrow.

Of course the weather will have reverted to type long before Nottingham Riviera opens on July 22. Nottingham City Council plan to dump three hundred tonnes of sand in the Old Market Square. There will also be a promenade, beach cafes, bucket and spade stalls, a large paddling pool (that’s already there, it’s called the fountain), deckchairs, crazy golf, trampolines, fairground rides, Punch and Judy, as well as rock and fudge with ‘I Love Nottingham’ stamped them.

Rather nice perhaps but also rather pointless and presumably rather expensive. Meanwhile they continue to cut services and to L’s frustration have recently decided to close the city library on a Friday to save money. Nice one, Nottingham.

The advantage of having the car is that we can do the Flowerpot for lunch. The new chef now has an assistant. All they need now is some customers. They desperately need to get back all the customers they’ve lost over the last six months due to the lack of a food service.

In the evening I take MD over for his Thursday training. It's his last for three weeks as I chuck up his training in favour of the madness that is the Nottingham Grand Prix’s four running races in ten days. Sorry mate.

Seems we did the right thing getting MD chipped and not getting him tattoo. You can’t be too careful particularly if your artist is Romanian, you do need to be careful to be clear about what you want and not to nod off. This is the story of the girl who had 56 stars tattooed on her face when apparently she only wanted three modest ones but all seemed fine until her father saw her face. 'I cannot go out on to the street, I am so embarrassed. I just look horrible.' she says with her face plastered over every newspaper on the planet.

It all reminds me of that Australian girl who put herself at the disposal of the entire England rugby team and then thought ‘oh shit’ when her boyfriend asked her to explain why she was late home and ended up launching a police investigation.

So I'm off on a short blog break now whilst I soak up the sun and beer in Devon. Brilliantly enough we’re off to a place called Beer.