Mat Bowles

Today has not been a good day. I spent most of the afternoon and early evening at the count, watching friends lose their seats or not gain them, then watched ballot papers get piled higher and higher in the "No" slot, and then had to clear a big pile of potentially spoilt ballots, which overwhelmingly meant me saying "yup, that person clearly meant to vote No" a lot more than the other way around.

So tonight, I'm watching Victoria Coren on Have I Got News For You (not a single guest I can't stand, this is a step up) and looking for things that make me laugh. This is doing the rounds:



Originally posted by webofevil, reposted by andrewducker and theweaselking. It's apparently very genuine.

Any and all links to funny, irreverent stuff that have nothing to do with politics, especially not the bloody awful AV referendum, very very gratefully received. As long as it's not LOLcats.

Last night was the worst night of my adult life. The fever finally broke at about 4am, and by 6am I could feel the medications I'd been dosing myself on actually take effect.

I work with kids. If I'd thought about it, I should've known to go get a flu jab, the thing is, every dose of flu I've had up to now has been a mild form of "knock you out for a few days, Lemsip'll help" type.

This dose of flu? Bloody awful. I've had it since last Sunday, thought I was getting over it Thursday, only to have it kick back in with a vengeance Friday afternoon. Apparently, total number of cases this year is about normal but the Govt is being criticised for not spending enough money on an advertising campaign to get people to go get their jabs.

Me? I always wondered why spending money on adverts for this sort of thing were needed. We have newspapers, TV news, radio news, etc. Govt ministers could simply push it as a news item and get the media to cover as an essential public interest story.

And those of us with some method of communicating news could help spread that message. Right?

Does this actually make sense, or is my brain so flu addled it's coming up with daft ideas again? If I'm right, feel free to link to this post, write your own, tweet it, share it on Facebook, etc. If I'm wrong, well, y'know, my brain is barely working.

Oh yeah. Merry Christmas. You're not supposed to take alcohol alongside a chunk of the pills I'm using to take the worst off. So I'm stone cold sober watching The One Ronnie. I think being sober is a mistake for this one.

So, I awoke this morning to hear Jennie crying in agony on the stairs from the attic room.

She'd been getting ready to go to work and had got some clothes from the attic drying racks. And slipped and fallen a few steps on the way down.

Normally, this sort of fall would merit a loud ow and possibly a minute or two to recover. Unfortunately, she has, for the last few weeks, had a cyst on one of her ovaries, that has been more than a little bit painful (for a definition of pain that us mere men simply cannot fathom, seriously, I don't know how she's been handling it).

The fall had caused the cyst to twist, turning the pain from very painful but livable to unbearable and causing her to scream in agony. An ambulance was called, she went to hospital. That was at about 1130.

They called in specialists, got a consultant to come in, and agreed operating today was both viable and necessary. Through a combination of keyhole surgery and more icky procedures, the cyst, which was walnut sized when diagnosed but had grown to bigger than tennis ball size by today, was cut up and removed.

Rather than waiting until February for the scheduled op, she's in hospital now sleepy quietly, and will be home either tomorrow or Tuesday. While she'll have the pain of a recovered operation, she'll be back on her feet by the end of the week and should be mostly recovered (but probably not well enough to return to work properly) by Christmas.

The pain will be over, and she can try to enjoy life a bit more. This is a Good Thing.

The Doctor did say that, given the rate of growth, they'd likely have had to bring the operation forward anyway, but it's done with now.

For those wondering why I've been mostly silent, with a side order of extreme crankiness in various online comment boxes, I've been more worried than a worried thing being worried (it was possible cancer at one point before formal diagnosis).

Tonight, I've had several glasses of whiskey, and am about to log off to play a bit of Plants Vs Zombies before trying to get some sleep.

Many thanks to all who've offered support &c, too much to take in today, but, y'know, she's going to be OK.

In actual terms, someone earning about £25K today is close to the average, and probably struggling to get by. But a hundred years ago, that would've been a very comfortable living. Two hundred years ago, that would've put you in the very wealthiest sector of society, with servants to do your bidding and every need catered for.

Triple that today, you're looking at a good earning for a member of the professions: a doctor, a lawyer, an MP. A hundred years ago, it'd give youa millionaires lifestyle. Two hundred years ago, a billionaires lifestyle. So I thought I'd do a poll...




( My answers to the above poll, with some explanations )

Oh come on, like I could resist posting this: It's a bit like ASCII art, but done with D6s. Must've taken a lot more patience than I could manage. From karohemd.

PSA: I am away for a few days as of about an hours time when I get on the bus, I'll be staying at my sister's, and I'm not taking the laptop, I'll likely use hers to check in, but I won't be online at my normal frequency.

Devon types!

Having completely lost track of who reads this that's still in Devon, well, no set plans, Red Arrows this evening, going to Dartmouth Regatta at some point, and probably visiting my grandmothers in Slapton and South Pool Saturday, travelling back up Sunday, I'll be reliant on my sister and/or buses to get about, but it'd be cool to see people if possible.

Why is it, when you've got loads of stuff to do, there's loads of interest in the news and on t'telly, that your body throws a stinking headcold at you that doesn't affect your physical abilities at all but completely messes up your brain's ability to think?

I'm trying to put the finishing touches to a blog redesign for a friend who's actually going to pay me good, solid money. Can I concentrate on it for long enough to actually, y'know, type a line of code?

Can I buggery.

The Prime Minister has finally gone and called the General Election, so it's 4 weeks and 2 days until we all get to go to the polls (or not, according to preference), and after that the really interesting stuff starts. Can I get my head into the right space to write about it? Dinnae be daft.

I'm the election agent for three local council candidates as well as having my own campaign to run in the 4th local seat. Spent the best part of yesterday out delivering, have a new leaflet to write and send to the organiser. Except my brain won't concentrate for long enough. On top of that I have loads of volunteers to help organise (seriously, we've got more local volunteers than the Tories have, how cool is that?), but I can't even type their email addresses properly.

Still, at least I've managed to write a post for t'blog. There's a reasonable chance that this may continue. There's also a good chance I'll keep using Twitter a lot over the next few weeks; I've got a new phone with a decent internet access y'see.

So, anyone want to come to Yorkshire and help me get my brain working?

Apparently, if I stop posting here, people will start ringing me to check I'm ok, or wondering what I'm up to, or other similar things. This is especially true if I just, y'know, stop writing stuff and stop commenting elsewhere.

Well, I did. It started as a weekend break from t'internet in which I didn't even look at my email, then it turned into a few months where I simply scanned my email for important stuff, occasionally checked into Twitter, but otherwise didn't read any of my reading, friends or feed pages and simply turned off. Honestly? It's been good.

So, what have I been doing instead? Well, making money definitely wasn't one of them. Ah well, that'll have to start changing. What I have been doing is enjoying life in many respects.

Learnt how to bake and cook

I've learnt, not just how to bake (which is quite easy), but also how to actually, y'know, properly cook. I am no longer scared by a recipe that requires I chop an onion. I know what a vichyssoise is (but not how to spell it), and have even made one. My carrot, cream and orange soup, adapted from Mary Berry's recipe, is quite simply gorgeous, and I successfully made baguettes yesterday.

I've been helping miss_s_b in the garden, in which we have potatoes, beetroot, oregano and even scented geraniums growing well. The newly planted garlic is already sprouting, so that'll be nice for next year.

Biggest bestest cake in the world

I've been spending time with amazing_holly, reading, playing games, cooking and having fun. I managed to get her to teach herself the basics of multiplication and division while baking a cake. I even, as a reward for her for sticking with learning to be good enough at Speed Racer to actually beat Mummy in a championship cooked, with her, the biggest bestest cake that Mister Mat has ever made! which has, somehow, now become the biggest bestest cake in the world. Well, she is 6. It was fun making it though, even if it was so big it had gone dry before we finished it.

But also? I've been playing games. A lot of games. For this you can mostly blame liadnan. Y'see, awhileback I had a catastrophic OS failure involving a critical Fx vulnerability and a dodgy porn site, and we gave up on fixing Windows and switched to Ubuntu for the main desktop. I had some problems getting a few things to work, and he pointed me at the wonder that is the world of Linux repositories. So I installed some, to see what I could find.

Open source, extendable games

Mostly, I found games. Open Source, extendable, games. Based on some wonderful classics like Elite, Civilisation, Sin City and similar. I will, I hope, write up the ones I enjoyed, just so I can have a record of them. I may even write up the ones I hated, to remind me not to install them again. In the meantime, I'm back. I've been reading, and even commenting on, most of my reading pages, and plan to completely reorganise them to keep my sanity in place.

In the meantime, enough about me, what've you guys been up to, have I missed much?

So, today was the 2nd annual visit of the parents. They do a lot of weekends away, spent last weekend in Cheshire at an event and have an event next weekend in North Yorkshire, so they come to visit us today and tomorrow.

So we have an attack of planned vs actual.

( So, about that late afternoon arrival time... )

( My Mum orders a 'snack' lunch for us... )

( A damn fine evening meal, only slightly spoiled by not having enough space left in our bellies... )

Tomorrow? We might go to Holmfirth. We might go to Wakefield for the National Sculpture Park (if only just to annoy Germaine "call me Professor" Greer). Don't know yet. I do know it requires us meeting my parents and the ungodly early hour of 10am. Wish us luck.