Discounting the silly song, it’s a mere 20 days* since last I blogged, but my goodness a lot has happened. The second biggest news is that we had Christmas! You might have had one too. Ours involved bouncing around the country like it was a giant, witch-riding-a-pig-shaped, snow-covered pinball table, and I was expecting the latter of those compound adjectives to thwart at least one of our multifarious plans, but by some miracle, and an unexpectedly heroic performance from my little Mazda Demio, everything went smoothly.

We got presents! I won’t list them all, because we’ve just moved house (I’ll get to that later), and we haven’t worked out how to set the burglar alarm yet, so it would be foolish to advertise our pile of diamond encrusted tiaras on the internet, but I’ll mention the make-your-own-bath-bomb kit I got from my sister, and the Robert E Fuller picture I got for Jess, and the falconry day she got from my family, because they all relate in some way to things I’ve told you about previously. So you can look out for more DIY bath bomb disasters (or maybe even successes) coming soon.

And then we went for our free sitting with everyone’s favourite Leicestershire photographer, which was fun but slightly depressing in that he’s only been doing it for, oh I don’t know, a year and a bit? and he already seems like more of a Proper Photographer than I feel like a Proper Illustrator.

Apparently our picture’s in the post. I’m all excited!

And then we had the Secret Birthday Present Thing I mentioned, which I think everyone assumed was for Jess, but in fact it was for her brothers, being a tour of Old Trafford, home of Manchester United! As a lifelong fan of the beautiful game you can imagine how thrilled I was to stand in the same spot as such footballing greats as Ian Botham, Eddie Edwards and Frank Bruno, and to see first hand the very field in which they’ve performed legendary home runs and match points. Ah, happy memories.

Then Jess turned 21, and has no doubt spent all her time since doing all the things you’re not allowed to do until you’re 21, though I can’t be certain because I don’t really know what they are. And then - and this is the biggest news - we moved house!

The new place is actually an apartment, the house it’s in having been split in two at some point in the past, so we’ve gone from paying £550 a month for a house to paying £625 a month for half a house, which on the face of it doesn’t seem like a very good deal, but it’s such a nice half a house. I like to walk around just looking at it and thinking how nice it is. Though of course at present that involves climbing over boxes.

It also involved climbing over bits of wardrobe. We ordered one from Argos and it came yesterday in a million pieces. Shall I go and try to make it now? I think I will.

* Make that 22 days. I got distracted.

I’ve never seen you looking so freakish with your withered arms,
I’ve never seen such hairy palms.
I’ve never seen so many men ask “Have you escaped from a zoo?
“Are there surgeons that you’re planning to sue? I would if I were you.”
And I never knew that adult diapers
Could be bought that come complete with holes for tails. (It’s like a whale’s.)

The lady in-bred is dancing with me, cheek to nose.
There’s nobody here, they fled I suppose. (Coz you’ve got eleven toes.)
And even if I were to gouge out my eyes,
I’ll never forget the way you look tonight.

I’ve never met a woman whose brother is her father too,
Seen a club foot in a high heel shoe.
I’ve never seen so many people laughing as they point at your face
Or call you a genetic disgrace. You’re like an alien race.
And I’ve never seen an eye so lazy,
Or a skull so oddly shaped and lacking chins. (And are those fins?)

The lady in-bred is dancing with me, cheek to ear.
I never much liked this blind date idea. (Wish I wasn’t here.)
I’ll wake in a sweat, and scream out in fright,
Coz I won’t forget the way you look tonight.
Wish I could forget the way you look tonight.
The lady in-bred,
The lady in-bred,
The lady in-bred,
My lady’s in-bred.

It’s been a busy month since last I put pen to blog.

We had a party! People came! There are pictures, but I don’t have them here, so you’ll just have to trust me. Unless you’re one of the people who came, in which case you can trust your memory. And if you’re not one of the people you came, then frankly you disgust me. Unless I didn’t invite you, in which case, er, sorry.

Amongst the gifts that were bestowed upon us was a photo frame wot’s designed with the intention of people signing it, so young nephew Thomas took it round and got everyone to. Almost everyone. He missed a few. Then all we needed was a good photo to put in it, and as luck would have it a passing Leicestershire photographer offered to add to our pile of gifts with a free sitting. Only metaphorically - he wasn’t proposing that we actually sit on the pile of gifts. They’d have got squashed. So that’s going to be happening shortly, and fans of the aforementioned photographer in Loughborough can look out for the result on this very blog.

Lots of other things are going to be happening shortly too. I reckon the only person who’s got a more hectic Christmas than us looks good in red and rides a sleigh. Tomorrow - and it is tomorrow as I write this, though it will be today by the time I’ve finished - we’re going to Leeds for a three course meal at my sister’s house cooked by a proper chef and everything. I’m imagining the guy from the Muppets, but it might not be like that, though I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t. The next day is Jess’s brothers’ birthday (that wasn’t apostrophe misuse - they’re twins), so we’ll be heading to Lancashire for that. It’s back to my sister’s on Christmas Eve, then back to Jess’s mum’s house on Christmas Day, to her auntie’s on Boxing Day, to Leicesecesester on the 27th, something secret on the 28th that I can’t talk about here because it’s a birthday present for someone who might conceivably read this, and before you know it it will be New Year’s Eve, which happens to also be Jess’s 21st.

With all that going on, arrangements had to be made for the chinchillas, so this afternoon a nice lady came to collect them. Unfortunately their cage wouldn’t fit in her car, so we had to follow her home, and the snow made what should have been a quick trip a much much longer one, and the driving experience much more like bumper cars, though by some miracle without any actual collisions.

And as if all that’s not enough, guess what we’re doing in the new year? Go on, guess. Nope, not even close. We’re moving! “But that’s crazy,” you may be thinking. “Jess finishes her degree in six months, then you’ll be leaving York for adventures elsewhere. What’s the point in relocating now?” Well the thing is that she wants to do an MSc next, which she can’t do at York, but all the places she can do it insist on already having the results of your first degree before you apply, which means she’s got to have a year out. And since we’re happy in York, we figured we might as well spend that year here. But where we live now is out in the middle of nowhere, so we decided to move somewhere closer to the action.

So we looked at a few places and found one we loved and said “We’ll take it!” and put down a deposit. Then we realised we’d misunderstood the terms of our current tenancy, and we’re not actually allowed to leave with a month’s notice like we’d thought, so for a while it seemed we might not after all be able to move to the place we’d fallen in love with. Luckily our current landlady’s doing her best to accommodate us and find a new tenant. We’ll probably end up paying rent twice in January, but given the deposit we’d lose if we backed out, going ahead regardless isn’t as financially reckless as it may appear.

And did I mention that it’s nearly Christmas? You might have already known that. I’m excited!

So I was having a tidy earlier and tossing a load of dirty clothes onto a pile in the bedroom, when I heard a muffled buzzing sound. I didn’t think much of it - I’m deaf in one ear, I get tinnitus - so I continued about my business, picking up my pile of clothes and taking it downstairs, where I dropped it to the floor. And as I did so, THE BIGGEST WASP YOU’VE EVER SEEN jumped out! It was like that one in Doctor Who when he met Agatha Christie! And I’d carried it downstairs in my pile of washing! It could have STUNG ME TO DEATH at any time!

I hurried back upstairs and grabbed the bottle of fly killer. Then I decided this might not be enough to slay such an enormous beast, so I grabbed a bottle of hairspray too. I figured if I couldn’t kill it I could at least give it a great hairdo. Possibly a beehive, a ha ha.

With hairspray coming at it from one direction and fly killer from the other, it didn’t know which way to turn. Eventually it opted for downwards. If you’re in the York area and you noticed a tremor earlier in the evening, it was my wasp hitting the floor.

So now I’ve got a gigantic wasp carcase to deal with. I figure if I carve it up I can dine on wasp steaks for a month.

Jess has always fancied trying her suitably gloved hand at falconry. We were planning a falconry day with the remaining money on the Red Letter Days voucher my sister got us last Christmas after using the bulk for a spot of Rasul, but we were incompetent, and by the time we got round to booking it the voucher had expired, so we didn’t. Another thing Jess likes is local wildlife artist Robert E Fuller, who’s got an exhibition on at the minute, so this afternoon we tootled along to take a look.

In the car park were some people from a falconry centre hawking their wares (do you see what I did there?), and they’d got a few birds in tow to help sell it. We moseyed over to have a look, and the next thing we knew a nice man was asking Jess if she wanted a go. Which of course she did.

And so our trip to look at some paintings was preceded by an unexpected and completely free opportunity for Jess to do something she’s wanted to do for aaaages. And I had the presence of mind to whip my phone out and record the moment for posterity.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Hello! I’ve been busy.

Even now I have a to do list as long as your arm - unless your arm’s longer than thirteen centimetres - but I haven’t blogged in over a hundred years, and I realise how desperate you must be to know what’s going on in my life, so I’m selflessly taking a break from more pressing matters to answer that very question. Not that it was a question, but I’m going to answer it anyway.

You’ll be excited to learn that I had another go at making a bath bomb. This time I used actual bicarbonate of soda and citric acid, and mixed in some smelly stuff, though I still haven’t got anything to dye them with so it was a fairly uninviting colour. I mixed it all up and moulded it into the traditional sphere, then left it to dry. A couple of days later it had collapsed under its own weight to more of a hemispherical shape, and wasn’t discernibly closer to drying, so I stuck it in the oven for a bit. This was where my first effort had gone horribly wrong, but this time there was no danger of caramelization due to the absence of sugar that’s a feature of bath bombs you didn’t make out of sherbet.

Sure enough, when I took it out a few hours later, it hadn’t caramelized. But nor had it dried, and what it had done was collapse into a sticky pool. Never mind - I sort of squished it together a bit into a squat cylinder, so it was more of a bath ice hockey puck than a bath bomb. Then, for good measure, I plucked a little dried flower head from my collection of potpourri, and stuck it on top. Then I left it to dry again.

A few days later it still wasn’t dry, but I was bored of waiting. I put it in my bath.

It kind of worked. It didn’t really dissolve completely - I was left with little lumps floating around in the water. And I don’t think it made much of a smell, though Jess was putting nail polish on at the time and this possibly overpowered it a bit. Next time I’m going to add more stinky stuff, and wait until it’s bone dry before use. It can’t possibly fail.

Elsewhere in the news I’ve been getting my novel ready for hawking to agents. I had to write a one page synopsis, which wasn’t half hard. Attempting to work out which strands of the story you can omit mentioning without the plot collapsing into an incoherent mess was almost exactly like playing Kerplunk, only with murders and remote controlled Daleks and Eeyore pyjama cases instead of sticks, and astrolabes and chandeliers and marshmallows instead of marbles. But I got there in the end, and bashed out a letter to go with it, and now all I need to do is print it all out onto a couple of rainforests, sell a couple of internal organs to pay for the stamps, and then I get to wait for a pile of rejection letters to land on my doormat. Except I can guarantee that won’t be the outcome because, cleverly, I haven’t got a doormat.

Meanwhile our engagement party draws ever closer. Are you coming? If you’ve been invited and you haven’t told me yet, you can expect a stern message on Facebook just as soon as I’ve worked my way eleven and a half centimetres down my to do list. So in about March.

Well, that’s the end of my novel. If you read it, well done! Thanks for the comments, it’s much better now I’ve had all the rubbish bits pointed out. Now I just have to hope agents like it.

But I’d still like more feedback before I start sending it off, so if you haven’t yet, you can read it now! Look, it’s got its very own page, with blood stains and everything. It’s just like reading a book, but on the computer! You don’t even need a Kindle^TM! I’ve updated it to the latest draft just for you, so it’s even better, and half the comments no longer make sense.

And now I’ll stop banging on about that. Until it’s been published (it could happen). Then I’ll be commanding you to buy it.

Instead let us talk about the future. Working from home permits me to live anywhere, providing there’s broadband, oxygen, an ambient temperature between -30°C and 39°C, clean water, a maximum background radiation level of 1000 Millirems per year, no giant mutant man eating tigers, a gravitational pull of between 0.7 and 1.4g, no airborne synthetic T-cells that will activate all my dormant genes and cause me to de-evolve into an Australopithecus, and a Domino’s Pizza within 10 miles. As a result, my location is dictated largely by Jess’s requirements. But where that will put us over the next few years is at present unknown.

Next week she starts her final academic year at York. After that, she’s probably going to do a masters, though we don’t yet know where, and she might first take a year out of education and get a job, though we don’t know where that will be either. But it means that we’ll be moving a couple of times, and it means we’ve got a few more years before she’s saddled with a job that will keep her occupied for forty-eight weeks of the year until retirement. And these facts prompted me to formulate a cunning plan.

Jess has occasionally expressed the urge to Travel, and I like the idea too, but it will become a whole lot more difficult once she’s got that forty-eight-weeks-a-year job, and it seems unlikely that I’ll have saved enough dosh before then that I can down tools for an extended period and See The World whilst still managing to pay the rent and the bills and the council tax without selling several internal organs. So I was trying to figure out ways it might be possible, and it struck me that since we’ll be moving anyway, there’s no reason why we couldn’t put all our stuff in storage for a couple of months mid-move, freeing us from all those unpleasant expenses. And since my income’s enough to maintain our glamorous lifestyle, anything she earns on her prospective year off can go in the bank, which means we’d have stacks of cash to play with in the months before she starts her second degree.

Whether it would be wise to blow those savings on such a venture, or whether it’s practical at all when you take Reality into account, and how on earth, if we do that, we’ll manage to also pay for a wedding, I don’t quite know. At the minute it’s very much in the Mad Idea That It Pleases Me To Toy With But I Haven’t Really Thought It Through Yet stage, which is the stage at which most of my great ideas die.

But you never know. It might happen. Question is, where would we go? I hear Blackpool’s very nice.