Yes, another photo of a field, I confess, but after an evening of said field, pub, fizz and fire in the garden, I think I’m entitled to share more of the wonders of simply being alive.
TheBoyEllis Blog
Dog bore and part-time piano-fiddling noise maker.
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Early morning dog walks are a mixture of bleary-eyed grumpiness and the wonders of nature.
I think summer might be here.
Time to phlog
Regular readers of my blog will have noted that recent posts have been scarce.
Sorry.
This is down to time – or lack of it – and the gradual realisation that sitting down every week to pen a recount of a recent escapade is about as achievable as developing a liking for George Osbourne.
It’s impossible.
However, it occurred to me recently that I take an awful lot of photos. Usually, these are of fields, bottles of beer or my dog, but there’s the odd one that tells a story of its own. This may lend itself to ‘phlogging’.
I must stress at this juncture that phlogging is not a form of sexual merriment but blogging taking on the form of a pictorial diary. I like the idea of that and, partly inspired by Mike Skinner (of The Streets fame – follow him on Twitter), I’m going to give it a bash.
Those are my last thoughts on a day which proved, beyond any doubt, that the benefit of taking holiday is questionable when the return simply lands you in a sea of unread emails and post it notes. And I haven’t even got a tan.
Little car, big problems.
Having broken down earlier that evening, I was feeling a little sorry for myself, therefore the two giant red signs informing me that only buses were allowed beyond the point ahead seemed a little harsh. Give me a break, I thought. I’ve had a tough night – just this once is the least I can ask for.
So, I headed through, confident the angels of the road were on my side.
They weren’t.
I’d made several catastrophic mistakes. Firstly, I’d picked Northampton’s busiest night spot through which to drive illegally. As usual, revellers were queuing to get into bars, stumbling across the street, arguing, fighting, crying and generally making Saturday night in Northampton what it has always been – horrendous.
I could perhaps have looked past this, but not on that fateful night a couple of weeks ago. No, due to my car breaking down earlier that evening, I’d had no choice but to take my wife’s Smart Car out. I’d also decided to bring my four-legged friend along for the ride. He sat, as he usually does, on the passenger seat, rear legs slumped either side of his belly and resting on his behind, like a gnome. We looked more Dumb and Dumber than Dukes of Hazard.
If I’d been out, drunk, I too would have found the spectacle of a man with his dog as a passenger driving a matchbox-sized car through a bus lane at eleven thirty on a Saturday night hilarious. Certainly, several people momentarily stopped punching each other in the face to watch me drive cautiously up the road.
Worse was to come. Out of nowhere a policeman appeared and motioned for me to wind the window down.
“Why are you driving up here?”
Immediately, I panicked.
“Sorry, I lost the plot back there,” I said. I knew what I meant, but the moment the words stumbled off my lips and fell into an incoherent pile on the floor, I realised it simply made me sound quite possibly drunk.
“What do you mean, you ‘lost the plot’?” asked the officer, quite understandably.
“Er… I just forgot you couldn’t drive up here.” At this point, the dog clambered over onto my lap and edged his nose to the open window, waiting for the most inopportune moment to plant a smacking great lick on Mr Policeman’s lips. That moment never arrived, thankfully.
All sorts of things rush through your mind when you’re getting told off by the police. Unfortunately, your blind determination to prove you are not a blithering, mental criminal means you inevitably come across as one, immediately.
“But you must know you can’t drive up here because you just told me that you can’t.”
He had a point, and an annoyingly good one. I certainly wasn’t in any position (or car) to argue the point.
I said something else, equally as pathetic which, thankfully, he interrupted.
“Turn around and drive back down there. This would normally be a £60 fine and three points. Be warned.”
I didn’t need asking twice, so quickly slammed the Smart Car in reverse (anyone who has one will know how long this can take), did the tiniest three point turn possible, grabbed first gear and very nearly ploughed knee caps first into a drunk man. He stumbled out of the way, thankfully, and I trundled off down the road, tail dangling limply between my tiny little car’s rear arches.
Thank you, angels of the road. Thanks for nothing.
The definitive guide to house buying and selling
Right, now it’s out of the way (and I therefore feel I can safely write about it without jeopardising anything via the medium of fate), here’s how a house sale and purchase works. Remember my earlier blog, which likened it to that of a huge eBay transaction. Pay attention to this and you won’t be on the receiving end of any nasty surprises. I promise. I may see if I can get it on Wikipedia. Or perhaps in the Bible.
1. You put your house on the market. Nothing happens. People visit, offer you £10 and demand to know why it isn’t within acceptable walking distance of the Kremlin. This continues for eons until every person, inanimate object and anything that matters is very dead.
2. You get some interest from investors. These people will want the house for £9 but will insist they’re perfect buyers because they will happily wait until the end of time for you to move out before they ship 30,000 immigrants into what used to be your master bedroom. You politely decline.
3. A first time buyer offers 90% of the lowest price you’ll accept. You say no. They up their offer to 91%. You say no, again. They magically find the remaining 9% but make it clear they had to sell important bits of their children and a goat in order to do so.
4. Your For Sale sign magically changes overnight. SOLD is in big letters, ‘subject to contract’ is in size 2 print beneath. Only, it’s that bit that matters now. No whooping and hollering like you get with Kirsty and Phil. Just a foreboding feeling of having little choice but to stare into the abyss that is THE REST OF THE PROCESS. Everyone you know and love tells you this is ‘the best bit’. You smile politely, knowing full well that having your lips gaffa taped to Mick Hucknall’s testicles for a year would be more enjoyable.
5. You start looking for a new house. You’ll look at twenty, all of which will be horrible and have current owners who either follow you around with hawk eyes or, as we experienced, are ghosts (one lady let us in, walked upstairs and then completely disappeared).
6. Just as you are inserting your head into the noose you’ve hung from your once-treasured SOLD sign, you decide to take one last look at Right Move. You swear a bit about the fact that it is still the worst website ever created, but you also find the house of your dreams. It’s perfect – even in the flesh – and you put an offer in. That’s rejected, so you try again with the only offer you know would ever be accepted, rendering your previous attempt completely pointless (although you settle for the fact it made you feel like Phil Spencer for five minutes). The new offer is accepted.
7. You don’t whoop, holler, punch the air or pop champagne corks; you realise everything that happens on Location, Location, Location is an absolute abomination and in no way reflects the arduous, depressing and stressful process at hand. All you do is begin to panic, mildly, and in stages, with the inevitable thud of each solicitor’s letter that hits your doormat every morning and the interminable and dread-filled toll of your mobile phone ring tone when the estate agent calls.
8. As if you haven’t got enough to worry about with the impending survey, your house begins to sink under the weight of the paper your solicitor and estate agent insist on sending you every five minutes. Royal Mail have to draft in extra staff and several new envelope manufacturing plants are built in North East China. Just for you.
9. Your buyer threatens to pull out unless they can move in three weeks ago and keep your telly. You call their bluff, they pop their willy back in their trousers and get on with crying uncontrollably into their own mound of paperwork.
10. Surveys take place. Non-existent damp is discovered, newly-fitted boilers are definitely broken unless independently inspected, bushes ‘erected without planning permission’ are deemed worthy of demolition and you are informed that you will definitely die of radon gas poisoning at your new home, even though no one can properly explain what the fuck it is.
11. Time stands still. New continents are formed, wars are fought, Apple run out of numbers to put after ‘iPhone’, new constellations appear in the night sky and new lifeforms are born, exist and go extinct.
12. You receive another piece of paper explaining your vendor is taking the toilet roll holder with them.
13. You reach exchange day. For reasons you cannot fathom, people insist on hand delivering their signed contracts and in turn holding everything up at the last minute. You resist the urge to suggest you’ll have your deposit delivered on horse back and divided into pieces of eight.
14. Exchange day lasts for a week as solicitors refuse to return calls, sign paper work and, presumably, give Janet in accounts a seeing to instead.
15. You exchange. Champagne corks are popped. You get drunk. Then, you wake up the next day and realise you’ve got to pack everything you own, including the dog, into as many boxes as you can steal from the back of Morrisons. This isn’t fun. Thoughts turn again to Mick Hucknall.
16. You move in. It’s done. You’re free to whoop and holler. If you know what that means. I don’t.
You’ll find better reviews of 2011
And so the curtains are gradually drawn on the year that was 2011… The economy is still as limp as a wet sock, we all had a good laugh/gasp at the unearthing and demise of criminal journalism, a couple of tyrants finally passed, the Royal Wedding provided a perfect excuse to drink alcohol before 10am, all Apple products suddenly made sense with the introduction of iOS5 and iCloud, someone shot Bin Laden in the face and the Eurozone… well, no one knows what’s going on with that, including the people involved, but it was (and still is) all very terrible indeed.
I spent most of the year either getting married or tidying up my iTunes library. I highly recommend both of these seismically different activities.
Next year, we have another long weekend to look forward to thanks to the Queen and a big school sports day in London which everyone is desperately trying to get excited about. The world is supposed to end at some point, too. 21st December, if you want to put it in your diary.
Me? I’m going to keep it simple and just enjoy being alive. For we are but once on this Earth.
Keyboard warriors aren’t what they used to be
A long time ago I had a yellow Fiat Punto. It was the exact same colour as my hair at the time, as my best man took great delight in explaining to our wedding guests. The car was what your parents would call a ‘souped-up’ edition with a turbo that propelled it forward like the Starship Enterprise and a suspension system which would do its level best to kill you if you dared attempt any type of corner.
As a result of owning the car and knowing no better, I joined the Punto owners club forum and set about arguing with as many people as possible. For no reason at all.
I was young, full of (incorrect) opinions on everything I didn’t know anything about and, crucially, hidden behind my keyboard, like a soldier crouching behind a sandbag. I was safe and could toss literary grenades at anyone who dared disagree with me.
The most memorable of arguments involved car air conditioning. No, really, stick with me. I argued that turning it on did not affect fuel economy, or engine power. I screamed about it in italics until several keys pinged off my keyboard. I’d used it for years, I said, and had never noticed a drop in either my MPG or less oomph when giving my right foot the beans. I was right and everyone else – including car manufacturers and respected motoring journalists – was totally wrong.
Only, I knew I was talking out of my backside. I was arguing for the sake of it. More worryingly, I was also getting deeper and deeper into a topic I knew literally nothing about. To make matters worse, my opponent did know what he was talking about and, to my horror, began detailing exactly how air conditioning works in cars and why it has adverse effects.
I can’t remember how it ended, but it probably involved lots of expletives and meaningless acronyms followed by a swift closure of Internet Explorer. That’s all I had. I was out of grenades.
It’s been a long time since I got involved in anything similar, but I spotted the following retweet from Chris Moyles earlier today:
RT“
@BrightNomad: lots of decent new music; just doesn’t get played by subhuman scum like@CHRISDJMOYLES” Merry Christmas to you too
I decided to check this BrightNomad chap out. I spotted he’d tweeted over 38,000 times which is pretty heroic in the world of social media. And when I say ‘heroic’ I actually mean catastrophically depressing. Bearing in mind Twitter only started in 2006, if we hypothetically suggest BrightNomad joined back then, he has tweeted, on average, twenty times a day, every day, for five years. That’s a lot of tweets, even for people with not very many friends at all.
His timeline was full of replies to people who had presumably tweeted him after seeing Moyles’ retweet. So, I thought I’d do the same and kindly point out what a terrible waste he was making of the wonderful tool that is Twitter.
What follows is a transcript of our conversation:
Mark Ellis: I suggest you read your timeline, although I’ll warn you – it makes pretty pathetic reading. Is this what social media is for?
Martin: I suggest you fuck off. Try it.
Mark Ellis: brilliant. How old are you, 12? And… Try what? Come on, you can do better with that keyboard. Hit me.
Martin: you have trouble fucking off then? Hardly surprising #MoylesScum really don’t know when to fuck off.
Mark Ellis: I’m just not sure where to go. I’m sat at my desk at work. If I leave, I’ll get sacked. ‘MoylesScum’? Please explain. And before you think I’m being a smart arse, I’m genuinely intrigued. A quick scan of your blog shows you’re a literate chap.
Martin: OK I apologise. You’re clearly not #MoylesScum that was a determined polite question & respect that.
I’ll be honest, I expected a bit more from him. Had this been on the Punto forum we’d be arguing into the early hours. Not so. Perhaps Martin and myself are of a similar age and therefore beyond that type of behaviour, but as far as keyboard duels go, the above is pretty pathetic.
I hereby withdraw my sword. I will not fight another battle.
The mother of all eBay transactions
A long time ago, I attempted to sell my better half’s beloved Fiesta on eBay. It was a sorry old thing – perfectly serviceable but a little tired. The stereo was gaffa-taped to the floor, rust was creeping in and its tappets were just about the happiest bunch of mechanical mysteries on the planet.
It did work, though, and was perfectly safe, which is why I was rather disappointed with the winning bidder’s reaction on viewing his new purchase.
“That’s been crashed,” he said, peering at the back of the car.
There was a little dent on the rear bumper, yes. Where it originated from I could only guess. A supermarket trolley, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t the result of crashing at speed, backwards, into a tree.
“It’s just a dent,” I replied before pointing out that this really didn’t matter – he’d won the auction, therefore the car was now his.
“We can’t take this. It’s a death trap.”
The guy, in his fifties, trudged round the Fiesta he’d won – if memory serves me correctly – for about £300. His son, who was the intended new owner was a bit more forgiving about the understandably scruffy appearance of a fifteen-year-old car.
“Come on, dad, it’s not that bad.”
“No, it’s been crashed, several times, I reckon. This guy’s having us on. Aren’t you?” He looked at me.
I simply reiterated the fact that it was now his, therefore any opinion he had on the car did not matter a jot. To reassure him, I pointed out that I wouldn’t have let my girlfriend drive around in it for a year if her perpetual habit of crashing into trees would have rendered it a death trap.
After some expletives, he bundled his son back into their car and sped off. Eventually, we had to give the car to a neighbour who insisted he could ‘make it disappear’ for £50.
Like nearly all eBay transactions, it was pointlessly expensive, needlesly complicated and, ultimately, an utter waste of time. I thought this kind of thing was limited only to eBay. However, imagine my surprise when, some ten years later, I find myself selling our house and purchasing another one only to find that the entire experience is exactly like that of an eBay transaction. A massive, stupid eBay transaction involving literally hundreds of thousands of pounds.
I’m not going to say any more at this stage, as I would rather not tempt fate. Think of this blog as a cliffhanger. A rubbish, boring cliffhanger, yes, but what I will eventually report on here will hopefully assist fellow naive house buyers and sellers. Stay tuned. Or don’t. I’m not really that fussed.
Gay me up, Scotty
I fancied a cup of tea the other day. So, without further ado, and taking fully into account that I was a recently married man and therefore allowed to request such things from my better half, asked for one.
The method with which I did so was more Star Trek than Jim Royale. Rather than scratching my arse, leaning back in the chair and barking my orders, I picked up my new iPhone 4S and asked it to send my wife a text message. Hey, this is 2011, I thought. Using new technology to ask my wife to do something I could quite easily do myself makes it far less chauvinistic and almost acceptable. Classy, even. I was quite pleased with my decision to do so, I’m not going to beat around the bush. Perhaps I would single-handedly change social politics forever. It felt like a big moment. Game changing.
What was neither classy nor acceptable, however, was the resulting text message Lindsey received which read, ‘Can I have another pussy please?’.
Quite how it substituted the homely sound of ‘tea’ for the rather more guttural ‘pussy’ I have no idea. Needless to say, she wasn’t particularly impressed.
Realising I needed to salvage the situation and try to avoid an instant annulment, I decided to tell my wife how much I loved her. That would sort it out. And, again, I wouldn’t need spoken words. Technology was my new friend and my harnessing of both it and the art of love would render me the type of husband all blokes aspire to be. I’d probably end up on Wikipedia, or something.
Once again, I turned to my phone and gently asked it to send my loved one a brief but ever-lasting sentence which confirmed she meant the world to me.
I shouldn’t have.
‘I love your ex,’ read the resulting text.
In approximately 5 minutes I’d managed to paint myself as a chauvinistic, sex-demanding homosexual. And all thanks to my new phone.
Siri is the real culprit here. It is a voice recognition system like no other, if you believe the Apple hype. Rather than issue pre-defined, scripted orders, you can have conversations with it. ‘It knows what you mean,’ boasts their website.
Clearly, it doesn’t always know what you mean. Yes, it’ll tell me what the weather isn’t going to do tomorrow (I’ve never once read an iPhone weather report that can reliably predict the future), allow me to set timers and inform me of what meetings I have next Wednesday. But when it comes to text messaging, it just does not have a clue what I’m talking about. More worryingly, it appears to be constantly questioning my sexuality.
Take the other night, when I wanted to let Lindsey know I was running late on the way home from work. I asked it to tell her that very fact but, instead, it responded with, ‘Mark, do you want me to confirm that Steven White is your wife?’. Much sweaty-fingered fumbling and bashing of the ‘cancel’ button ensued. As I was driving at the time, this somewhat diminished the most obvious (only?) advantage of Siri – allowing you to send text messages whilst maintaining control of a motor vehicle. Instead, I almost confirmed I was married to a man I only know through weekly 5-a-side football and very nearly crashed legs-first into an elderly passer by. I never thought I’d do either of those things and certainly not at the same time.
In all fairness, Siri is clearly labeled as ‘beta’, which essentially means it isn’t ready for public consumption. This is unusual of Apple but shows how excited they are by the new feature which is, joking apart, pretty impressive. That said, it does seem that it’s early appearance is perhaps more intended to impress with it’s potential and, more often than not, amuse with it’s rather poor grasp of it’s master’s dialect.
Thankfully, I’m not alone in my Siri scrapes. At 11:30pm the other night, Lindsey attempted to push the capabilities of the software as far as I’d imagine they’re willing to go by asking, ‘What is on this season’s catwalk?’ I immediately chortled, suggesting it wouldn’t have a clue. My amusement was short lived, though – and not because it dutifully gave a Gok Wan-like run down of the colours and shapes we should all aspire to be wearing – no, because, in response, it proceeded to call someone else I occasionally play football with.
No 5
As dust bales roll through the digital streets of the once dense, sarcasm- and expletive-strewn jungle that is TheBoyEllis Blog, I can confirm that I am still alive. Postaweek2011 appears to have claimed its next victim (I’d imagine there’s been a fair few) after a heady month that was dominated by marriage, associated celebrations and the much-needed holidaying that follows.
Concerned I had little to write about, I thought I may have struck gold last week after our dealings with the housing market; firstly attempting to buy a new house from a builder via a part exchange scheme and, after that predictably failed miserably, deciding to put our house on the market and buy an older place. This sounded like perfect source material, until I realised I could only really muster one sentence describing the whole affair, which is:
No one in the housing market knows what they’re talking about.
And that’s not much of a blog, is it?
Yesterday, however, Apple rolled into town in all its grandiose, questionable statistic chomping glory and delivered the perfect excuse for me to pick up the digital pen once again.
I bought an iPhone 4 pretty much as soon as it came out. Because I’m stupid. But, in my defence, it was brilliant. The ‘retina’ screen looked like those fake photos of screens mobile phone shops place on the handsets in store, such was its vibrancy and crystal, seemingly pixel-free clarity. Only, it wasn’t a photo – it was actually the screen, which you could touch and watch respond. Just as when I first played with an iPhone, it felt like I was in Star Trek (being a child of the 80s, it doesn’t take a huge amount to get me excited).
Then, I, along with the millions who had also flocked to buy the precision engineered slice of metal and glass, attempted to make a phone call. This proved difficult because, as we were to find out, in order to make a successful call without the signal dropping, we had to hold the phone as though we were holding a piece of dog poo against our ear; a kind of ginger, two-fingered affair which ensured we didn’t accidentally create a bridge between two pieces of the ‘ground-breaking’ external antenna which must never be joined. If they become one, the result is a bit like when you cross lightsabre beams, only three million times more boring.
Apple then embarked on an uncharacteristic and creepily frantic attempt to prove that other phones do the exact same thing. Several videos appeared on their website of someone (Mr Jobs?) squeezing various models of Blackberrys and Android phones to prove that they too lose their signal when ‘held incorrectly’. Clearly realising that what they were doing was akin to a drunken ex-boyfriend bashing his genitalia against his former girlfriend’s front door in an attempt to prove it is as adequate as that by which it has been replaced, the videos were soon removed.
Steve Jobs even had to make an unscheduled stage appearance to make sure everyone was aware it was their own fault and not Apple’s. He did so in typically nonchalant style, although he did concede that they’d all had to stay past chucking out time on several occasions to work on a reasonable excuse.
This was all very irritating at first, but we all soon realised that this was an iPhone and, as such, its inadequacies as a phone (there are a number) do not matter. It is shiny and cool and Steve had quite clearly explained why we are all to blame. So, we stopped complaining and carried on playing with iFart.
Now, Apple have a new phone. With so many expecting the number 5 to make an appearance, it is no surprise that a collective sigh was exhaled after Apple simply added the letter ‘S’ to the end of the current product’s name.
Yes, now we have an iPhone 4S. It has the same A5 CPU that powers the iPad 2 and which will provide all of the unplayable first person shooter games on iOS with graphics that modern gaming consoles can only dream of. Web pages will open half a second quicker and the camera will no longer wait until Gaddafi has been captured, tried and beheaded before opening.
Ah, the camera. This is much better. Once again managing to make fresh titfer out of old hat, 8MP stills and 1080P HD recording were the headlines, but Apple also went into minute detail about how they have achieved near-DSLR quality imagery with the addition of all manner of professional grade components and lenses.
After everyone had woken up, they went on to demonstrate Siri. This was their ‘just one other thing…’ moment. The bit we all wait for at Apple conferences.
Siri basically means you can talk to your phone and it will respond appropriately. Set tasks, reply to messages, find out how lunar space travel works. You name it – literally – and it’ll do it. The demo was, admittedly, very impressive.
Odd, then, that the only reason I can think I want an iPhone 4S is because it will finally allow me to replace my black iPhone 4 with a white one…
