I spent a good deal of the weekend sitting in a car. My long-suffering girlfriend, my brother and I did what turned out pretty much to be a flying visit to Scotland. My father lives about 270 miles north of me, so we drove up on Friday night to there. And then, dropping my brother off, we continued up to my girlfriend’s friend’s house (who had just given birth to a beautiful baby girl) a further 170 miles north. Later in the afternoon we went back down to meet my brother and father to go out for a meal in St. Andrews (“The Vine Leaf Restaurant”, 131 South Street - I’d highly recommend it).

So by the end of Saturday night we’d driven about 450 miles. A great deal of that on twisty roads in atrocious weather. So Sunday was a day of well deserved rest. But all too quickly we were back in the car again and driving back down to Yorkshire at break-neck speeds (anybody who says women drivers are slow should go for a spin with my girlfriend – she’ll scare the hell out of you).

My girlfriend and I are well used to driving for hours on motorways but my brother is not. He got bored pretty quickly (my attempt to sing loudly drove him to distraction). But it set me thinking about how I manage to stay alert when driving long distances. So here are a few of my techniques:

1. Way point counting. When I do a long journey multiple times I start to make a mental note of evenly spaced checkpoints (say every 30 minutes) so that I can count how many checkpoints I still have to go before I get home.

2. Mile countdown. I zero my car’s trip counter when I leave and knowing the total journey distance I can work out, at my current cruising speed, how long it will take to get there. I slightly vary my speed now and then to alter my ETA so that I can work out when I’ll arrive.

3. Gran Turismo mode. When I’m tired I start to view driving along a motorway like playing a driving game on a games console. Especially if it’s dark. I start to look at other cars and trucks as competitors and try to take the racing line along the road (so frequently changing lanes). This doesn’t usually last long as I have to remind myself to not die in a car crash at 120mph.

4. Learning a new album. I put a new CD into the car that I don’t know the words to. My mission for the drive becomes to be able to sing that whole album from start to finish. So I play it over and over, singing along, until I can accomplish this goal.

5. The cats-eye-aversion game. The little reflective strips that separate the lanes (between the painted lines on a road) are slightly raised to you feel a bump when you drive over them. This game involves aligning the car each time you change lane so that none of your wheels drive over them (i.e. you concentrate on driving over the painted lines instead), and counting how many miles you can “stay clean”. This can keep you amused for hours, unless you slip up and catch a back wheel on one and have to start over.

6. The one-two. This involved overtaking a car. Then you slow down to let him overtake you. Then you speed up and overtake him again. And you continue this until you spot a faster car to do the same to. Then the game begins again. This can be fun as people sometimes take a while to realise what you’re doing and then they sometimes join in on the fun and speed up too while you slow down and vice-versa (thereby making the gap larger).

7. The comedy name game. This requires a passenger. Every time a car passes, you have to think of a sentence to say that involves the car make or model, such as “you really need to get your life into Focus” when a Ford Focus goes past. The trick is to not let the passenger realise what you’re doing and you need to be pretty imaginative to succeed for long.

There are plenty more bizarre games that I play when I’m bored in a car, but they tend to be even more surreal (such as the “Most off-key singing game”) that you will benefit from not knowing. How do you stop yourself from falling asleep at the wheel? Do you get your passenger to read out article from John’s Adventures? I do hope not.

Okay, try this. Close your mouth and breathe in through your nose. Nice isn’t it? Well, now pinch your nose so that you can’t suck any air in and then relax your grip slightly so that only a tiny amount can get in. Now breathe like that through your nose for a minute or so. It’s pretty annoying isn’t it? Just like having a cold. Frustrating and eventually you’ll want to let go of your nose or breathe through your mouth. Well, that’s what it’s like all the time for me. My nasal passages are pretty narrow and this means that I can’t really breathe through my nose at all – it’s like it’s permanently blocked.

This is the reason I never sleep more than 3-4 hours at any one time. My brain has worked out that my nose is useless and so when I fall asleep I automatically breathe through my mouth. This means that after a couple of hours my mouth gets extremely dry. And then it gets so dry that I wake up and take a swig of juice. I then go back to sleep again and the whole cycle continues.

To be honest, this has never really bothered me and I’ve never really noticed it. Until now. You see I’ve found a way to breathe like a normal human being. I’ve discovered nasal strips. These are pieces of self-adhesive plastic that you place over your nose. They have the effect of widening the nasal passages and increase the oxygen intake of an athlete. Whether they do any good or not to athletes is questionable, but the change they make to me is incredible.

My long-suffering girlfriend happened to get a free packet of them and I decided to put one on just for fun. And as soon as I did it changed my life (I’m not exaggerating). I could breathe through my nose! I could suck in a deep breath without fighting for it! I could close my mouth and not suffocate within a few minutes! So I’ve worn them for the past couple of nights. My brain still makes me breathe through my mouth when I sleep (it’s tough to teach your brain new tricks), but the feeling of being able to breathe properly is like a drug – and I love it. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.

But come morning my dream wears off. I get up and wander over to the shower and realise that I’m going to have to take the strip off. I’m breathing normally with it on and I think to myself that “it won’t be that bad” and maybe my nose will be okay this time. But as soon as I remove it, my nose is back to normal and it feels like someone has put cotton wool up my nostrils. It’s terrible. Like Cinderella after the ball when her carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

So I have two choices: either I go and buy another box of strips and just wear them in the evening – removing them and coming down to earth the following morning. Or I could go and have surgery to widen my nostrils. I’m not sure I can be bothered with an operation, although my company offers free private health care so it’s tempting. I’ll persist with the nasal strips for now, as I can live without having my nostrils altered, but I just had to write down how wonderful being able to breathe is. So go on, spend the next ten minutes breathing through your nose only. I certainly won’t be able to without sounding like a vacuum cleaner or collapsing with asphyxia. But you can for me!

A lot of people don’t like change. In all the 20 or so years that I lived with my parents in our first house we never once changed the furniture around in the living room. It was all my mother’s fault. She just didn’t like to change things and when she was happy with something, then that was the way it would stay. My brother and I certainly tried to persuade her to maybe move the TV to another corner and swap the sofa and armchair around, and maybe put the cheese plant over there. But she wouldn’t have it. So it never changed.

I, on the other hand, relish change. It’s not that I get bored of things the way they are, it’s just that I find changing things around can be refreshing. When my brother moved into my house we decided to shift some of the furniture around upstairs (the bedroom) to give him a bit more space and still leave an area free for me to use my weights. The space saved was pretty small but the psychological change made the room feel much larger and more welcoming. There’s no rational argument for it, but I suppose “a change is as good as a rest”.

So with this spirit in mind I’m trying to adapt to the fact that we’re moving rooms at work. When I joined the company for the first time (this is my second spell with them) over 3 years ago the development team lived downstairs in a large room alongside the managers and the customer engineers lived upstairs. Our company builds machines so it was decided that part of the bottom floor would be converted to do the assembly, the development team moved upstairs and the managers moved into a new room at the other side of the building. And that’s how things have stayed. And it’s been great. The upstairs roof is really high, with wooden rafters, air conditioning, large windows with views out over a wooded area filled with squirrels and the like. It’s fair to say that it’s lovely.

But change is afoot. We’ve had a couple of spells of downsizing and are half the size we used to be. So we’re rattling around in a huge office with enough room to each swing a grizzly bear around without fear of interference from each other (assuming the grizzlies don’t mind). So the company’s decided to sub-let upstairs to another company and we’ll move back downstairs again and things will be kind of like they used to. Except they won’t.

There two very large glass doors downstairs that used to provide a lot of light into the room and hide the fact that the rest of the windows are very small. Unfortunately, the room is now divided into two rooms with a wall and door in between. This means that the room we’ll be moving in to has a lot less light and ambiance than it used to. And doesn’t compare to the place we’re moving from. So some people aren’t happy about it. It’s not the dot com boom any more so people like us can’t just shake our rattles and get what we want (those were the days) so we have to make do.

But if I’m honest, I’m quite looking forward to it. Simply because it’s going to be different and therefore a bit of fun for a while (until the novelty wears off). I could be negative and say we’re getting the rough end of the stick (all the nice rooms are ear-marked for customer demos or constructing machines) and that by sub-letting upstairs we’re going to be a bit screwed if we want to expand again when the economy improves.

No. I’d rather be positive and say it’s a new beginning. The dawn of a new era (to use my favourite, over-used expression). I won’t have such a nice view out the window as I do at the moment (I’m watching a grey squirrel foraging for food right now) and the work will remain the same, but with some more lighting and some plants dotted around the place it should take on a character of its own. Only time will tell, and Friday is the day of the move. I might take pictures at 20 minute intervals and do one of those photo sequences where an empty room is transformed into a bustling office…

Well, it’s getting colder in Yorkshire. There wasn’t much of a summer by my standards (my criteria for a nice spell of weather is at least 7 days with not a cloud in the sky – haven’t had that for a few years). But whatever decent weather we had is on the way out. Just last week it all changed. Strong winds, clear skies and a large drop in temperature. The nights have been drawing in slowly over the past month or so, but it seems to have suddenly accelerated so it’s dark by about 6.20pm.

I know when Autumn is upon us because I find myself wearing different clothes (and before you laugh I’m not like Bart Simpson - I do change my clothes every day - I mean that I change the type of clothes I wear). During the Summer months I wear either t-shirts or light, long sleeved tops so that I don’t get too hot. But come Autumn I break into my large collection of sweaters and start to work my way through them. I’ve got everything from reasonably light cotton tops to the sweater equivalent of a Wooly Mammoth coat complete with too-long sleeves and a collar that needs to be folded over a couple of times before I can see out of it (I love that top, maybe I’ll post a photo of it).

But of all the seasonal shifts I must say that I dislike Summer to Autumn the most. Okay, you get to wrap yourself up warmly and snuggle down in front of the fire. For me Autumn is the pregnant pause before Winter, and it’s not much good for anything. You can’t go snowboarding because it hasn’t snowed yet, but you won’t get a suntan because it’s cold, although not cold enough to wear a toasty down jacket. Winters are pretty wet, cold, miserable affairs in Yorkshire and that’s about all you’ve got to look forward to at this time of year. It’s almost like the world is saying “right, you’ve had it easy, now prepare for several months of misery”.

Maybe I’m being pessimistic. And you’re probably right. I was just starting to get in good shape on my mountain bike, and along comes Autumn to make the days so short that there isn’t enough daylight to go out after work and it’s too cold to wear my fetching short-sleeved biking top. I suppose I’ll just have to hold on and bike on the weekends and wait until I can go snowboarding in a couple of months.

I know that us Scots are supposed to be hardy and not complain about the cold, but that’s not my point – I can take the cold. It’s just the in-between weather that does my head in. Give me two complete seasons. It’s either red-hot and not a cloud in the sky. Or it’s ice cold, there’s loads of snow and not a cloud in the sky. Am I being unrealistic? Probably.

Well, I’ve put it off for long enough. But by popular request I’ve decided it’s time to put it down in writing. Anybody that I’ve told this story to has always said it’s really romantic and, to be honest, it’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ve been a bit unsure about writing about it as it’s a lot more slushy than the usual material I post and it’s very personal. But hey, names have been changed to protect the innocent and it makes a really nice story. I’m not sure I can do it justice but I’ll try. So here we go: the story of how my long-suffering girlfriend and I met.

I’ve mentioned many times before that I moved down to Yorkshire from Scotland in 1999. I didn’t know anybody in the area so I was really stepping into the unknown. To me it was an adventure and I was about ready for an adventure. So a few weeks before I started my new job my father, brother and I drove down to the area to see if we could find me a place to live. We checked a few places out and eventually found a really kick-ass mews house that was only a few years old. The problem was that I’d have to wait a further month before I could move in. It was, and is, a great house so I waited and lived in a hotel for my first month (kindly paid for by my new employer).

So after 4 weeks I finally got to move in. I literally had a bag of clothes with me so I picked up the keys, went to the house to drop my stuff off with a plan to then drive up to Scotland, pick up my brother and he could help me move all my belongings down and we could go and buy some furniture. But on that Friday evening after work I went into my house and as I came out I bumped into my next door neighbour. She introduced herself and told me her name (which I immediately forgot) and we chatted for a few minutes. I though “she’s a bit of all right”, bade her farewell and drove off to Scotland.

I didn’t see her for a few weeks but then we started talking. I had no idea if she was single or not and I assumed not as I would often see guys dropping in and cars staying overnight. So I didn’t get my hopes up. She seemed like a really nice girl so I thought that if I could just be friends with her then that’d be cool – I’d know somebody in the area. The first thing that I really liked about her was that she was very independent. She wasn’t like the girls I’d gone out with before; the needy, high-maintenance types that you can’t leave alone in a room of full people and always have to act up for. No, she lived on her own and did her own thing because she chose to. She was a woman.

So we started by talking, telling each other about ourselves and getting to know each other over the coming months. We went to the cinema a few times (she said that it was great to have someone to go to the cinema with) and we’d often talk until the small hours in the morning. Sometimes she’d drop around for a chat and other times I’d dream up an original excuse to drop around and chat to her. She was quite often out at nights as she had a busy social calendar (she was into amateur dramatics and such like) so I would only see her a couple of nights a week and chat to her over the fence at weekends, if I wasn’t away mountain biking. We were getting on really well and I realised that I didn’t want to push it any further if she didn’t as I wouldn’t want to lose a really nice friend like that.

Then one night she did something that is number one on my top-ten memories list. Being a Yorkshire lass she’s a hell of a cook and suggested she cook us a Chinese meal one night. This she did, only she put a hell of a lot of effort into it. Little bowls of delicious Chinese cuisine (not the stuff you get out of a packet), chopsticks, candles, the works. She rolled out a rug and we sat down on the floor to eat what was a fantastic meal, drinking fine wine too. It was wonderful and we were never stuck for conversation. But I was no closer to finding out if she wanted to take it any further. She’s a damn good looking woman and I’m no oil painting so I understood that I could be at the back of a long list.

Well, after a good six months of getting to know each other, things went further (I won’t go into detail, it’s not that sort of site). I took her along to my work Christmas do (she referred to herself as rent-a-neighbour) and then she went away on holiday skiing in the Alps. When she came back we were an item. And here we are nearly three years later, still going strong.

To summarise, she was the girl next door. I was the boy next door. And we spent six months courting and getting to know each other before anything happened. The fact that we’re still together after so long is testament to the fact that we got to know each other first. I’m at the stage where I couldn’t imagine life without her and no matter how far in the future I picture, she’s always there. My heart misses a beat every time I see her and when she’s not around a part of me is missing too. That’s as slushy as I’m going to get.

I later discovered her side of the story. When she first met me she was a bit disappointed as I was pretty young. She normally went out with older guys. So I had failed at the first hurdle. She was actually seeing a guy when we met but they broke up as the relationship had run its course. She genuinely did think it was a good idea to have someone to go to the cinema with – so she wasn’t trying to make moves on me. And right until she went on holiday at Christmas time she wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to go out with me or not! She was as unsure as I was and wasn’t following any kind of plan. The things you learn with hindsight.

However, the story I always like to tell of how we met is that she was doing some gardening and as I looked out my window all I could see was her bent over, facing away, pulling weeds. I was hooked! Of course, that story isn’t true. Unfortunately. And I haven’t yet decided which version makes my memoirs…

If you knew me from school (all those years ago) and hadn’t seen me since, you’d be quite surprised how I turned out. It’s an obvious fact that people change drastically when they leave school and grow up, so this is nothing new. But I was just thinking back to how I used to react to situations and what my motivations and attitudes to my environment were – and it is like watching a different person.

I’m a fairly competitive guy. And I always have been. But these days if I’m having a game of tennis and I lose badly, then I just laugh. I enjoy playing and I do try my best, but sometimes the other guy is just better than me or I make loads of rookie mistakes and throw the match away. But I just love to play. Contrast that with when I used to play squash. When I was a teenager I was pretty handy at the game and took great pleasure in giving my father a run for his money on the court. But I had a large Achilles heel. I was the world’s worst loser.

It wasn’t that I used to swear if I lost points. It wasn’t that I used to get angry with myself. It was just that I used to totally lose control. I smashed several rackets against the walls (breaking many in the process). I shouted and swore at the top of my voice and my blood pressure must have been high enough to boil an egg on my forehead. When I broke my last racket I quit. I had come to realise that this childish, John McEnroe behaviour was pathetic and I needed to get a life. So I put down my racket and swore I’d never play again as long as I lived. And I never did, until I started playing again a couple of years ago.

In the time between I played a lot of tennis and returning to a squash court showed me that I had in fact forgotten how to play. I was serious about quitting for life so I had subconsciously purged all my tactical knowledge from my memory. Anyway, I played a colleague at work and lost. In fact I played him several times and although it was always close, he always managed to edge the result. And you know what? I didn’t lose my temper once. I didn’t smash my racket or even get tense. I just enjoyed playing. I tried my best but the outcome no longer mattered to me. I had expected to roll back the years and be a tantruming teenager again but it just didn’t happen.

It took about 20 years, but I had managed to work out the most important lesson in my life: you are only in competition with yourself. As long as you always give your best, then you can’t complain – even if you lose.

I’ll never forget watching Roger Black winning the silver medal in the 400m in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. It’s my favourite sporting moment by the way and still gives me the shivers when I think about it. He was beaten by the superhuman Michael Johnson on that day but Roger seemed quite happy. Years later I saw him interviewed about the day and he said that even though he was standing on the second step to get his medal that he felt like he had won the race. His reasoning was that he had given his absolute best effort and couldn’t have gone any faster or tried any harder. So he had won his race.

And that’s what I do now. When I play tennis, squash, football or work I’m not interested in trying to beat anybody else. I’m focused only on doing my best. And that’s what separates me from the kid I was at school. The only thing that mattered to me was trying to impress other people. But now I’m really not interested. I do things because I enjoy doing them. Not because I think people will think I’m cool for doing them or that I have to be one-up on somebody else by doing them.

So when I was playing pool last night and getting a pasting (as I quite often do) I didn’t complain. I just enjoyed playing and potting a few balls. And when I play table football I might petulantly throw the ball away after I lose but it’s purely for humour, there’s no malice or bad sportsmanship. So for anybody I burned along the way by being an arrogant, competitive, selfish git. I apologise. But hey, you weren’t exactly perfect either!

I won’t share him. No. John’s mine and I won’t let anybody else have him.

He moved in over three years ago and I was in heaven. It was great. I got to watch him as he slept on the floor, then bought furniture and moved all his stuff in. When he got satellite TV I shared his joy as he had several hundred channels of rubbish to watch on the box. Meaning he’d spend more time with me. And it was great.

But then he started seeing this woman. She’d come around from time to time and it made me feel ill. He’d spend evenings out with her and I wouldn’t see him until later. Then she started to sleep here! I was paralysed with anger. So I made his bed lumpy to discourage her from staying all the time. It worked. But instead he went out and stayed with her. I was livid. But I could just about cope. I still spent a lot of quality time with him.

But there’s a new threat to our harmony. It’s a guy. He looks similar to John, but younger. He’s got the same Scottish accent as John. But I don’t like him. This imposter has moved in while John has moved out to his damn girlfriend’s house. So I hardly see any of John. Just this bloke. But I know his weakness. I’ve been listening to them talking and I know he has allergy problems. So I went to work.

I showered my floor and the furniture with dust. I know he’s allergic to dust so I thought I’d use this to drive him out. It was working. He was having trouble breathing and he was suffering. But then he and John cleaned the whole place and sucked up all the dust. They even opened all the windows to let some fresh air in! I was distraught. But I wasn’t finished. I realised that my sofa could give him the same problems. And so it did. He was breathing badly again. And my plan was looking good.

But they came up with a counter plan. They bought some sheets (a nice colour and pattern actually) and threw them over the sofa. I couldn’t believe it. He was starting to breathe properly again. They’d worked out what I was doing and foiled my scheme.

But I’m not finished. Not by a long shot. I’m going to drive this charlatan out. I’ve executed the next stage in my plan. He’s wheezing again and he hasn’t worked out why. He’s taking antihistamine until he can figure it out. I know John is trying to help him but I’ve excelled myself this time. They’ll never figure it out and he’ll have to leave. And then it’ll be just John and me again. Like old times. And we’ll be together. Forever.

John’s house.

In my line of work there is a requirement to be creative at certain times. As a software engineer I will admit that I do spend a fair amount of my time surfing the internet. And I’ll admit that a certain percentage of that time is spent looking at non-work-related material. I also spend a fair amount of time doing tedious things like testing and bug fixing. These essential parts of the software development process have to be done (we’re all human and make mistakes and it is impossible to write bug free code – I don’t care what you say) and in fact they make up the majority of my working time.

I spend perhaps 80% of my time doing unexciting things, some of them pretty dull. So that leaves 20% of my time to do the less unexciting things (you’ll note that I didn’t say “exciting things”). For me the most interesting thing about writing software is the stage where you have a general idea of what you want to create, but need to come up with some neat way of doing that. It could be a clever piece of user interface or a neat way of designing some code to accomplish some complex task. Quite often I can draw upon past experience and just do the same again^TM. But sometimes I need to come up with a completely new idea. To create something from scratch. And doing that can be an interesting process.

Creativity is a difficult thing to measure and control. Like growing a plant you can’t force it to happen. Highly creative people tend (in my experience) to be passionate people who can very quickly go from states of high creativity to nothing at all. Some, like the author Douglas Adams, suffered from long periods of writer’s block. I expected when I started this site to have periods when I couldn’t write anything at all and I pictured myself tearing my hair out trying to think of what to write about. This hasn’t happened (unlucky for you) and I believe it’s due to the fact that I’ve worked out how to control my own creative flow.

I’m a pretty disciplined guy and am not prone to mood swings and emotional outbursts. This means I don’t have to rely on flashes of inspiration to make decisions. I just sit back and think about problems and try to solve them logically, with varying degrees of success. While I’m doing that - going through as many possibilities as I can – ideas will just magically pop into my head. Most of them are ridiculous, but thinking about them gives me more ideas and they build on top of each other until I have a few sensible solutions. The one thing I never do is put pressure on myself.

I firmly believe that pressure is self-imposed. If your boss is breathing down your neck to have that report on his desk in one hour sharp then you might argue that he is putting pressure on you. I on the other hand don’t give a damn about my boss’s wrath. I am no respecter of rank – if you are a beggar in the street or the Emperor of Earth then I’ll treat you just the same. We’re all just people at the end of the day. So if I don’t have it on his desk in one hour then so what? In a thousand years time I don’t see historians saying “the fall of modern civilisation was triggered by John not finishing that report on time”. So by not really bothering about the outcome I am free to actually get on with the task unhindered and guess what? I easily got it in on time. And it was the best darned report my boss ever read! Cue the future historians saying “the reason civilisation is still here today was that John managed to finish that report on time”. The point is, you put pressure on yourself.

So without pressuring myself to be creative and staying cool (and just being a carefree sort of guy) it just seems to happen. I recall reading about Douglas Adams after he was paid an advance to write his next book. He worked out how much he was getting paid to write each word by extrapolating how long the book was going to be. The pressure of getting paid a considerable amount of money just to write the word “it” got the better of him and just extended his writer’s block. Poor fellah.

I’ve not been posting much over the past couple of weeks. I could say that my trip to Amsterdam required a considerable period of time to recover from. But the truth is that I’ve been doing a few things that I wasn’t interested in writing about. Some of them personal (too personal for you lot to read about), others of them so dull that I suspect my mailing list would be empty faster than I can say “watching paint dry”. But - as the title suggests - this is the dawn of a new era.

I am of course talking about my younger brother moving into my house. For those of you who haven’t read it already, he’s a couple of years younger than me and I managed to persuade him to come and live in Yorkshire and find a job down here. He wasn’t too happy in his job in Scotland and since our mother died he’s had a lot less reasons to stay up there. Anyway, he’s down here now and reality has set in.

I spent the weekend in Scotland helping to clear out my parent’s house of junk and making sure my brother remembered to bring his toothbrush and the other essentials. The two of us even went out for a meal with my father followed by a trip to the cinema (saw The Bourne Identity, which was pretty good as far as action-packed movies go) and didn’t have a single argument. I guess we’re making progress after all these years – we tended to bicker quite a lot in the past and it’s great that we can finally get along like normal human beings.

So back to the main point. My brother and I drove down on Sunday night (well, I was a few hours ahead of him) to begin our new life. His aim is to get a job and then a place of his own. My aim is for him to get a job and then a place of his own. But seriously, it’ll be fun – like two grizzlies being forced to live in the same cage. Fortunately we do actually get on pretty well and - aside from the fact that he once punched one of my teeth out (he always denies that and he might even be right) – we always have.

Anyway, I’m moving some of my stuff to my long-suffering girlfriend’s house and borrowing a chest of drawers to give my bro a bit more space for his clobber so that he can feel a bit more at home. He’s very keen to get a job (he’s not much of a fan of lying around a house all day) so I’ll not need to nag him to “get his lazy arse out of bed” – he’s not that kinda guy.

But already (after a single day) I can see that I’m prone to “He’s-Just-Like-His-Father Syndrome”, which is the state you enter when you make the same complaints that your father used to make to you. Living on my own means I can run a tight ship. Or I can be a messy git. Or I can do either on a whim and not bother at all. But with having a tennant my idiosyncrasies come to the fore. I’m saying things like “put the paper in the basket” or “don’t leave the bin lid up, it’ll stink the place out” and the all-time classic “don’t leave your shoes there – I’ll fall over them!”. It’s terrible, so I’m going to have to learn to be even more mellow and less annoying (it’s going to be hard work).

The saga begins. L8R.