Matt's Blog

No, not my divorce party - looks like that's going to drag on a while longer yet - but Val and Patrick's. Sue cooked us a lovely dinner and then we spent the rest of the evening drinking champagne and wine! I have to say that I did feel a bit rough this morning. It's the first time I've gone into work with a hang over for a long time.

We spent today in Portsmouth, doing a bit of shopping (I've got a nice pair of jeans and Sue and Amelia have both got very nice dresses), going up the big tower thingy (largest suspended glass floor in Europe apparently, though it didn't seem particularly large) and then taking a tour around HMS Victory. All very entertaining.

On the downside I have Pilates at 8am tomorrow morning so I must get to bed at a reasonable time.

Labels: Portsmouth

We've just come back from a very nice weekend in Glastonbury. It was a bit of a last minute decision but we phoned around, found a nice pub to stay at and drove down. The pub was a bit run down but very clean and friendly. We ate dinner there and the curries they served were the nicest I've had for a while. They also served very nice bottled Thatchers organic cider which made it even more attractive.

Glastonbury itself seemed to have more dreadlocks per head of population than is reasonable. However, it wasn't all graffiti and hippies. The Abbey ruins were still as evocative as ever.

After the Glastonbury and Wells on Saturday, on Sunday we went for a bit of anti-culture (ie shopping) at the Clarks shopping village and then slowly made our way home via Salisbury and Stone Henge.


Now it's back to real life for the usual hectic round of ironing, cooking (the organic veg turned up) and work.

Labels: glastonbury

It looks like the wife of the man with whom my wife was having an affair (ie Val T!) has finally been able to get her life sorted out. She's got the consent order for the finances as is applying for her decree absolute. I'm quite jealous - I haven't even got a completed financial statement from my wife. It should all have been done and dusted by now. It's nearly a year since she told me she was leaving me (and a year and a half since she took up with Kevin, but that's a different story). You'd think she would be in more of a hurry to get on with things but there doesn't seem much evidence of it so far.

Apparently I was more worn out from the weekend than I thought as I've got a cold. So I've been playing around installing adblocker on my browser. Obviously if everybody blocked out all the adverts on the internet, we'd be a bit stuck as that's how much of it is funded. And occasionally adverts are useful. However too many adverts are annoying and a pain so I've decided to block:

1. Anything that downloads scripts to run due to the performance hit (so goodbye google-analytics.com)
2. Anything that shows the advert on top of the text I'm trying to read
3. Anything where the advert insists of loading before the main content. I don't mind the adverts but making me wait for the ad servers before I can see the main page seems a bit poor.

I'll be glad to go back to work to recover. On Friday Sue and I went to the gym and then I went to Pilates. Then it was the weekly shop. On Saturday we went to Windsor and I got to play with my new camera. Look! Windsor castle!
On Sunday it was down the gym again and then we went over for a stroll around Chawton, famous for being the residence of Jane Austen, though we were able to resist the temptation to pay to go around her house. We were able to see Chawton House from the distance but must try and arrange a visit on day. The church on the estate was also interesting, though the pews didn't look particularly comfortable.

After that, we went back up to Alton to use the tickets we won to go on the Watercress Line. Whilst steam trains aren't really my thing, it was quite interesting. We saw a model for Home and Country having her photo taken outside the train in the steam. Unfortunately we were shooed away from taking a snap of her and I couldn't be bothered to argue the point with them. She did look freezing cold though, so rather her than me.

Here's the obligatory picture of a steam train.

Having nearly broken my camera phone before xmas by taking pictures in the pouring rain, I've been out and bought myself and shiny new waterproof and shock proof camera: an Olympus mju 790SW from Cameras2u. It's all turned up ok and was quite a bit cheaper than the local Jessops, even though cameras2u are now owned by Jessops.