Author: The Shroders

I know it seems like about 3 weeks ago, but “The Pandemic” was 4 years ago now and that seems insane to me. I swear it was barely yesterday we were doing happy hours on Zoom and my usual routine of coughing to cover a fart was turned completely on it’s head.

When I think about that period of time I think about a few things, firstly my absolute dependence on Busch Light, truly the cheapest beer I have drunk since I was 15, secondly the sheer boredom of never leaving my house or doing anything of any note whatsoever. Finally and most relevant for this 10 minutes of nonsense, I think of Tiger King.

Writing this for a sort of mid-Atlantic audience I often find myself describing things for both Americans and Brits. I do not think I need to do this with Joe Exotic and Tiger King. For a solid 3 months, Tiger King was everything and everywhere. I hate watching shows everyone says I have to watch. I have never seen one episode of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Wire or The Sopranos. If everyone tells me I MUST watch something it has the complete opposite effect on me, but this was during the pandemic, there was no sport to watch nobody was making any TV so there were reasons I caved and watched it.

I could not go one terribly forced Zoom call to someone without them telling me that it was the craziest thing ever and that I wouldn’t believe what I was watching. As Laura was on every single one of those Zoom calls with me and she has a lot more control over the TV than she would admit I caved and watched it.

Side note here, Laura would argue that she does not control the TV. In the past 3 months I’ve watched no less than 14 seasons of “Sister Wives”, 2 seasons of “Selling OC” and I am now 3 seasons into a show called “This is us” which makes literally no sense to me whatsoever. So any arguments that she doesn’t control the TV should be dismissed out of hand immediately.

Anyway on what felt like day 1643 of getting up, putting shorts on, cracking a beer and sitting on my couch until it was time to go back to bed we started Tiger King. For once, every person who told me to watch it was right. It was incredible, we watched the show, the making of the show, the Netflix watch party of the show, YouTube videos on the show, YouTube videos of people watching the show…. Fuck me it was a desperate time to be alive.. For a solid 3 weeks we came up with theories, looked at whether when life returned we could drive the 90 minutes to Carole Baskin’s sanctuary and even entered an online Pub Trivia night based around the show… Again thinking back, it was the most incredibly desperate time of my life..

Then just as quickly as Joe Exotic’s polyamorous gay marriage entered our lives it disappeared. Slowly life got back to normal and I was no longer trying to work out how much money the person who had their arm ripped off by the tiger got and whether or not I would take that amount to lose my left arm. I started leaving the house again and apart from a complete and utter suspicion of every other human in my sight for about 18 months and having to remember how to drive again everything was kind of like it was before Covid, just a bit different.

The other thing I did whilst sat on my fat ass at home was get stupidly into cryptocurrency. I watched videos, I bought some Ethereum and became “that guy”, the one with a surface knowledge of a topic who spent hours trying to convince his wife we could retire in 4 months if we just remortgaged the house and put it in to Crypto.

Around about a year later both of these things had disappeared from my life, replaced by cruises or darts or the new dog or whatever the random specific thing I was interested in for 3 weeks was at that time. Apparently I haven’t got ADHD, but if I haven’t then fuck knows how anyone who has got it functions. I can’t even write one of these blogs without at least three “side notes” (The irony of this being a side note is not lost on me)

Imagine my surprise when one day I was scrolling through Twitter, desperately trying to get my immediate hit of dopamine when I saw a tweet from a crypto influencer I had followed tweeting randomly about whether or not there would be a Tiger King season 2. Two completely unrelated things, or so I thought…

The next day he announced that TKING, the Tiger King crypto currency was being launched. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why but I knew right then I wanted some. It was a Thursday night and I spent 3 hours researching and figuring out how to buy it. I bought $200 worth there and then.

We were doing a little staycation that weekend and by Saturday at about 3pm I was 14 Miami Vices in, floating round the lazy river, the thought of my $200 the furthest thing from my mind. We went upstairs to get ready for dinner and as is often the case I was waiting for the ladies in my life to get ready, so I thought I would check if it was still worth $200 or if I had wasted it.

I opened the laptop, jumped through the many hoops needed to confirm my identity and for just a second couldn’t breathe. I was up to $1,000, in 2 days!

From that point I was balls in. I joined message groups, I spent my evenings researching how much I could make, it became my life. The general chat around it was that if they announced a second season we would be millionaires and the day the 2nd season actually came out we would be billionaires.

I remember it like it was yesterday the day the second season was announced. We were on the boat from New York City to the Statue of Liberty and I saw the tweet. Everyone else was staring at Lady Liberty (Much cleaner than I expected) and I was logging in to some random app on my phone to see where we were at. My $200 was worth $20,000.

I wanted out. A brief chat with Laura and 25 minutes dicking around trying to sell it and I took half which was useful timing as I was in New York and that profit covered about 1/3 of my Uber bill for the weekend.

What this meant was though I had $10k still in there just waiting for November 18th when Season 2 came out and it was mentioned in the show! I was going to be able to retire.

November 18th came and I was going to Washington for a work conference but was ready to cash out, until I herniated 3 disks in my back going through security at Orlando Airport, was blue lighted down the runway, taken to the nearest hospital and dosed up on enough Morphine to keep me asleep for two days.

When I came too the first thing I wanted was not my doting wife, or children (just as well really because none of them were there) but my phone to see how rich I was.

Well season 2 was shit, they didn’t mention the coin once and my $10k was now worth $5 oh and I had a $9,900 hospital bill. The coin had gone up over 10,000% at one point yet I still came out of it $100 worse off than when I started. I looked at the historical prices as some sort of sick prank on myself. At the exact time I was in the ambulance my coins had been worth over $50,000. When I figured it out I nearly asked for more morphine.

I’ve never heard of Joe Exotic since that day and frankly if I never do hear his name again it will be too soon.

Writing the three different blogs I have over the last 11 years or so I used them as a bit of an outlet really. They were never meant to be anything more than me getting things off my chest, an outlet for things that were bugging me, or documenting the stupid stuff that happens to us.

I never expected or desired to go particularly “viral”, especially at first. The first one I wrote about what a nightmare it was to get the train to London did actually get more popular than I thought it would and whilst I wouldn’t say it went viral, it was getting a lot of views, comments and I could have monetized it if we had stayed in England.

The second blog about our time in Houston also did fairly well. Recently I was speaking to another expat friend who read it when they lived in Singapore. We didn’t know them at the time I wrote it and it randomly came up in conversation a few weeks ago. That was a bit of a surprise to me and made me realize that with a bit more self promotion and more regular commitment to actually writing I could perhaps grow something.

The Shroders in Florida grew into a Youtube channel, right around the time the kids got into watching random people play Minecraft online and make millions of dollars. A wonderful time in my life when Freddie wasn’t in any way self-conscious, would film a load of the content for me and like everything I get into for 15 minutes I spent a load of money on a Macbook, GoPro, editing software and royalty free music. Again I wanted to use this as a way of documenting the stuff we do. Sort of like a family album that I can look back on when I’m even greyer and even older. I didn’t expect to make money or become famous, but I did look into what I needed in order to do so. At that time I needed 100 subscribers to be accepted into the monetization program. (It has changed significantly since)

100 measily subscribers. I have 6 Gmail addresses, so that was an easy 6, just 94 to go. Friends and family should get me close, then a few stragglers should have got me there. Editing videos is time consuming and I am shit at it. Our videos were too long, they were all about cruises, nobody gave a shit and right now I sit at 58 measily subscribers. Remember that number, it is important later.

I set up a Facebook creator page, a Twitter account and all sorts to try and promote it, but to be honest I don’t like over self promotion, the Facebook page has 209 followers. Again, remember that number.

I tell you all this for a reason. Not just to vent about how I can’t seem to get anywhere. I know the reason why. I don’t post regularly on either here or YouTube, our content is niche to say the least and the editing is awful. In fact I am not even allowed to make anymore videos. Kids being the horrible little shits they are, especially teenage kids, found the YouTube page and the upshot of that is Fred is not so keen on being involved at all anymore, so instead of uploading these videos I now have 45 hours of random footage saved on multiple hard drives around my house.

The reason I am venting about this is that it appears Laura through no effort whatsoever has achieved a level in social media fame that no amount of witty blogs or 35 minute videos of random cruise ships could ever achieve. She is now an accredited Facebook creator with over 700 followers and is on the verge of qualifying for monetization.

How did this happen? Well last year we went back to England, nobody really knew, especially Laura’s Mum and Dad, it was a suprise trip some 4 weeks after Laura’s Mum’s 70th birthday. We snuck round to their house and Laura asked me to film her knocking on the door and surprising them. There was zero discussion of what this would look like, what the plan was, just point and shoot.

We got there nice and quietly, Laura walked to the door, me filming the entire time. Her Dad was sitting outside and one child ran straight over to surprise him. Laura banging on the door at the same time. As the front door opened a noise so high pitched not even dogs could hear it screeched “HAPPPPYYY 70TH BIRTHDAY!!!”

That was the whole video. 35 seconds tops. Laura uploaded it to her facebook and we thought nothing more of it. There were a few nice comments and likes, but other than the children constantly mocking Laura’s high pitched screech over the last year we never thought about it again. I mean it wasn’t even her Birthday, that had been weeks previous.

That was until last night.

Sitting on the sofa, flicking through her phone Laura tells me about a notification she has received from Facebook. She get’s hundreds of Facebook notifications, we are borderline boomers. Instagram and TikTok mean nothing to us, Facebook is our Social Media of choice and Laura is balls deep in Facebook every minute of the day she isn’t on the phone to her friend Gail. We basically at this point live totally separate lives, 8 inches apart on the sofa. Some crappy Netflix show or documentary on, Laura scrolling through 30 second reels, occasionally asking me to summarize the entire motivations of the main protagnist in the 14th serial killer documentary we have watched in 15 seconds, before just telling me he was sexually driven despite not watching a minute of it.

This notification though warranted her stopping scrolling and telling me, so it had to be important.

It turns out Facebook has identified her and then certified her as a “Digital Creator” off the back of one completely unedited 35 second reel. That one reel that is so high pitched every time it gets played in this house bats circle us for an hour has led her to over 700 followers.

3 and a half times more followers than The Shroders in Florida Facebook page which I actually spent time and effort crafting.

Marriage should be about celebrating each others successes, If Laura is successful then I am successful and vice versa. Bollocks to that. I am seething about this.

I estimate that I have put in about 100 hours, writing, re-writing, filming, editing, uploading even some planning for the sake of 200 people occasionally looking and significantly less watching any of the YouTube videos. Laura doesn’t even film this video and all of a sudden the checks from Zuckerberg are about to come rolling in.

700 followers off the back of one video. I’ve watched this video 100 times now I can’t understand it at all.

Laura has embraced this new found fame as only she knows how. Diving deep into analytics that she has no clue what they mean. Sharing really God awful reels other people have done then checking the “Dashboard” to see what “Engagement” she has got. Literally two days ago she had no idea about any of this, now she is the next Mr Beast.

Jealousy is not a great trait, I am not jealous really but I am pissed off. I might be biased but I have put out some top tier content. I have been expecting calls from publishers for at least 6 years now and nothing but crickets and the occasional phone call from the “Best Supporting Actress” of Laura’s viral masterpiece her mum, telling me she almost literally pissed herself at my recounting of me getting stung in the right nut by a rogue bee or Laura flooding the back yard.

So I have made a decision, I think I am gonna put out some reels of me ranting in my car… I can’t put up with being married to an influencer with a bigger following than me, or I am going to hijack her profile and put a video out calling all her followers inbred assholes. Either way I will have more followers!!!

I remember the day Steve Irwin died like it was yesterday, not because Steve Irwin died but because it was the day Richard Hammond of UK Top Gear had a major car accident. Laura and I hadn’t officially started going out at that point but she was sniffing round me like a fly round shit. Attracted like so many before her to my Mustard yellow TImberland sweatshirt and my somewhat transient living situation.

Laura loved Richard Hammond, more so than she loved Jason Manford. Richard Hammond is about 5 feet 6 inches tall and looks a bit like a hamster, but regardless Laura was all in, so that is why I know exactly that Steve Irwin died in September 2006. Her responses to the many Steve Irwin jokes I sent her were at best muted, she was incredibly worried about Hammond.

Steve Irwin was a hero to many. Not to me, I thought he was an utter idiot, but many people did and still do love his closeness to nature and his bravery handling wild animals. I never really got it. Play with fire enough and you get burned and while getting impaled by a Stingray is high on my list of unusual causes of death for him it seems fitting.

I had largely forgotten about the poor mans Crocodile Dundee until this weekend, much like Harriet had forgotten to hand in 2 weeks worth of homework despite doing it all flawlessly. I mean Jesus Christ, at least Fred gets to play on his X-box for 3 hours when he gets a zero in his homework. H sat there and did it and then still scored a zero….

Saturday though brought the memory of Irwin home hard though. I was out in the back yard by the pool trying for the millionth time trying to get the damn airless tire on Freds scooter. My hands cut to ribbons, sweat pouring from my brow, occasional swear words yelled at the top of my lungs, drowning out the gentle birdsong and the low hum of the pool pump. Laura and Fred were with me, supposedly pushing down on the tire with all of their might.

Laura was doing that, she was genuinely trying. Fred on the other hand was using his finger tips to transfer his body weight onto the tire. That was annoying me, but when the wheel slipped and I cut myself for the 5th time in 20 minutes I am not to proud to say I lost my shit.

Not wanting to go into explicit detail to Fred of exactly what I thought of his effort I walked away towards the back of our screened in area and again swore, quite loudly. As I got about halfway back there I stopped dead in my tracks. There was a 5 foot long snake trying to climb up the screen and it was on the inside…

I am British, we don’t have snakes, we aren’t Ireland, St Patrick didn’t banish them all, it’s just too damn cold. So when I saw this snake I shit myself. Laura then saw it, she shit herself, Fred couldn’t have cared less.

One thing I forget to say when describing the scene is that I was dressed for the day, Fred was dressed for the day, Laura however had her pyjamas on, it was only 1pm after all. Consisting of some extremely baggy booty shoots and an even baggier vest top, this is important information.

I don’t know what to do with a snake, it wasn’t venomous but it’s still a snake. Adrenaline was high in 66% of us. In situations like this I like to take a step back, work out a plan and get it right first time. Laura, the ying to my yang just goes to town. Before I had chance to properly assess the situation, blood pouring from my cut hand, Laura was in the corner trying to “shoo” this snake out with the pool net.

I am unsure what was less suitable for the task at hand, the net or Laura’s baggy arse PJ’s but this just made the situation worse. The snake got rightfully pissed off, it nearly went in the pool, but then just made a beeline for Fred and I. Moving at the speed of light spurred on by the shit plastic net hitting it and Laura’s ear piercing screams it just came at us, then right at the last minute turned and scooted behind my bar.

This was a problem. When we could see the snake it was bad enough, but now like when Superman puts on a pair of glasses we had no idea where it was.

Now we could pivot to the Dave solution. Take our time. Nope…

Under “strict” instructions from a 5 feet 3 woman with 3/4 of her ass hanging out of her shorts I moved the fridge, slowly because I was still shitting myself. It was there staring at us, just out of reach. All we had to do was wait for it to move and then we could “guide” it out of the door a mere 2 feet away. I don’t think i verbalized this plan because the pyjama wearing paramilitary was banging the bar within 3 seconds of us locating it.

Surprisingly this didn’t work. The snake climbed up the bar and into all of the glasses. At this point we are truly fucked. We can’t move the glasses, we cant use the super aggressive sweeping tactics that had got us this far. We were stuck, or so I thought.

In the blink of an eye Laura had a can of wasp spray. I don’t 100% remember if I thought this was a good idea, adrenaline was flowing. But just as quickly Laura is spraying the entire area with wasp spray, particularly viciously directly into the snake’s eye.

Incredibly this worked. The snake was stunned and just slowly and of it’s own accord slid down the bar and out the door, never to be seen again. We were saved. Laura stood there victorious, ass cheeks still sticking out of the sleep shorts, like a red faced, slightly older Daisy Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard. I had completely forgotten my scooter inflicted injury and Fred had moved about 3 feet from his original starting position.

It was at this point and with the thrill of the chase over I hatched my plan. It was not a venomous snake, it was medium in size, I have gardening gloves. I could have put them on and picked it up, there was no danger. All I needed was 30 seconds to think without the distraction of the screaming and the ass cheeks.

What has come of this though is that Laura now see’s herself as the savior of the house (rightly so) and very much the Canvey Island Steve Irwin.

I on the other hand am seriously considering going swimming with the Sting Rays.

I have a fancy office job, for the last 20+ years my idea of a hard days graft was to sit in a padded chair in an air conditioned office, the most physically demanding thing I have had to do is walk to my car at lunch time. As I type this however, my hands are dirty, my once white T-Shirt is blackened almost certainly beyond any future use and sweat is pouring off me like I am Josef Fritzl on an episode of MTV Cribs.

I think I have said before that one of my life goals was to earn enough money so that when manual things went wrong I could pay an expert to fix them. I am an expert in very few things, sleeping, alcohol consumption and losing my wallet, so why would I do a half arsed job of fixing things around the house? It just isn’t my skillset.

About 25 years ago I had a summer job at a factory that made tractors. I was so bad at putting together the bits of the axel that I was responsible for I got moved to a role cutting the cable ties around the electronics. I messed that up most of the time.

So when Fred comes to me about 2 weeks ago to tell me his electric scooter has a problem with it’s back wheel I am less than overjoyed. This is yet another toy one of my children has that is entirely my fault they have it. Something you should know about me is I like Christmas, particularly giving the kids presents at Christmas. They get spoiled. Somehow I always seem to hit my biggest bonus of the year around October/November and that means they end up with presents like a $600 electric scooter, or a random hoverboard, or and I kid you not a 6 foot long human sized dog bed.

The huge dog bed is front of mind right now because as I sit in my office I can hear Laura shouting at Harriet that we need to find somewhere for said dog bed to go because we have a visitor coming and it can’t stay in the spare room. Honestly it is 6 foot long and 4 foot wide, we have a pretty sizable house, but even so there is nowhere this thing can go.

But I digress, back to Freds broken scooter. I promised him I would have a look at get it fixed one way or the other and he was OK with that. When I said it 2 weeks ago I meant it, at some undetermined point in the future. Yesterday however it became the most important thing in our families history and needed to be fixed immediately. This directive came not from Fred, but Laura, angry that I was working from home and she had to go into the school she decided to follow up on every little possible task at once because it was “on her to do list”. Firstly, all the jobs on the list are jobs that have been given to me, so it is MY to do list, secondly I am working from home, not having a day off. I had a full day of meetings, training, calls and tasks to be getting on with. Nothing on that list appeared more important than fixing the scooter.

Lunch time came and I took a break from work and I did what I do whenever I am doing anything like this, I watched 15 YouTube videos on how to fix it. This is common knowledge in my house that Dad watches YouTube videos on how to do almost anything. It seemed complicated. The tire that is flat is on a wheel that has the motor in it, its a monumental job. I called around four different bike shops to see if anyone would touch it and that’s when I realized I was in trouble. Not one person wanted anything to do with it. Apparently it is a tough job, that isn’t worth doing, it takes too long and nobody has any 8.5 inch tires.

Undeterred I went to Amazon, purchased a completely new wheel, with a tire already on so I can just change the wheel and thought while I wait for that to come I will at least take the rear wheel off and have it all ready to go.

Jesus Christ I am stupid.

Part of never doing any manual labor is that I have about 6 tools. None of which were even close to taking the nut off the rear axle (Super technical phrasing here I know). So what do I need? A socket set. Don’t have one. Another trip back to the computer and Jeff Bezos’ black hole of spending and a socket set will be with me by dinner time.

It’s incredible they deliver so quickly, and when it came I snuck back out to the garage at about 8pm to undo these two nuts then it should be simple from there. The fact I am dedicating a whole post to this means it obviously wasn’t. This socket set had sockets up to and including 9/16 of an inch. At best guess I would say these nuts are 3/4 of an inch, not..even..close… Time to pack it in and fight the good fight another day.

By the time I got in today the new wheel had arrived I had been to Home Depot and bought the right size socket this should be a 10 minute job from here. It took me 45 minutes to undo the first bolt, I swore a lot, I lost about 8lbs in sweat (it’s so hot here right now) and I am filthy, but with a great sense of satisfaction I did it, now just put the new wheel on with it’s fancy airless tire and jobs a goodun.

I have bought the wrong fucking wheel…. I cannot adequately explain how angry I am right now. The wheel doesn’t have motor on it, so if I put it on Fred has an incredibly expensive push scooter. So far this flat tire has cost me $139.67 and all I have to show for it is parts of a scooter spread across my garage, a T-shirt I can’t wear and a bad attitude.

I came in to the office sulking and swearing under my breath, closely followed by Laura asking me if I had thought about watching a YouTube video on how to fix it. That calmed me right down…

I’ve just ordered the right wheel and it gets here tomorrow morning before 11am. It was $114… I should have just bought a new scooter.

Living in America is awesome and I am very lucky that I get to do so. It was my childhood dream and even now nearly 10 years after I got onto the plane at Heathrow to move to Houston I still have to pinch myself most days that it is actually happening.

Before I moved to America though I had been loads of times to visit and in my head America was kind of the same as England, just with better weather, absolutely enormous soft drinks for 89c at the gas station and cheaper McDonalds. That actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes both countries speak their own version of English, yes a lot of shops are the same (damn you to hell IKEA) and yes a lot of the TV shows are the same, but there are some things that are just very different.

Recently something has caught my attention over here and I need to share it particularly with those who would have no way of ever seeing or hearing it, it also made me think of a load of other examples of something very different

One of my favorite parts of the day is my commute to and from work. Back in England I used to slog my way up to London on the bus and train, it was awful and in fact provided no end of material for my first ever blog. Everything from people using their iPads to look up reviews for prostitutes, to the never ending delays and someone starting a bee farm, there are no words that can accurately describe how much I hated that commute.

Here though I get to sit in my nicely airconditioned car, nobody bothering me listening to whatever podcast or radio show I want. My drive is 20 minutes each way, but sometimes I go the back way to drag it out a bit longer, especially in the morning, just to put off the inevitable work day a little longer. It’s a weird thing to enjoy, but enjoy it I do. It’s my time to myself where nobody is asking me questions, I am not having to try and do 13 year old’s Science homework or teach Harriet the 8 times table for the 150th time

During this 40 odd minutes a day I generally listen to different podcasts, some from back home, some American based, usually either sport or comedy in content, sometimes a mixture of the two in one and it was during one of these podcasts that I stumbled across what may be the most unintentionally funny thing I have ever heard in my 44 years on this planet.

The podcast in question was The Dan LeBatard Show. Dan LeBatard is a Miami based sports journalist who surrounds himself with a lot of funny people and it is something that has become integral to my routine since I first moved to America. It gives me just enough US Sport to be able to have conversations with other men but is funny enough to keep my interest when they get into the depths of who the Oklahoma City Thunder might be picking in the 5th round of the NBA draft.

This particular day they were speaking about a new commercial deal they had signed to advertise on their show. Usually this is a sports betting company or a car spare parts company, something really obvious for a show aimed at men aged 30-55. This deal however was something very very different.

They cut to an advert to introduce this new headline sponsorship deal and the advert started with a very upbeat jingle and then the first line…. “If it hurts when you poop sometimes”… OK I thought, my diet is 95% meat, sometimes it feels like its coming out sideways so whilst this is unexpected I am all ears.. The jingle continues

“Like pinching off a porcupine” Err what?? “wrestled out a wrecking ball” OK this has taken a turn, “pushed through a pineapple or two”. This is getting very odd, the jingle is on a ukulele and it’s this really sweet sounding woman going into graphic detail about how she can’t shit. But it gets even worse…

“Tried to pass an elephant, rolled out a watermelon, strained until you turned a shade of Oooooh!” I am color blind so I don’t know much about shades, but I fear that if you are turning a shade of Oooooh then you might have some serious issues that can’t be fixed by this sweet ladies jingle. Perhaps a trip to a trained medical professional may be in order.

Then as is the case with all America adverts about medicine, and their are a lot, a voice over comes on and explains “When pooping is painful, Doctors recommend Colace”.

Never mind Colace, if it feels like you are shitting an elephant I’d think some Bran Flakes might be in order.

American adverts are insane, truly something I can’t get my head around even still. I can’t watch anything live without the good people at Manscape coming on my TV and telling me my balls sweat and I now need ball deodorant, or the Pepto Bismal ad where a woman looks over her shoulder seductively at the camera, pats her arse and whispers “diarrhea” before walking off into the middle distance. All time great wrestling legend Ric Flair has started telling me to buy Generic Viagra for $1.29 a tablet recently, literally straight after an advert for diapers that are 100% “Poonami proof”. As a father who has had to hold a child at arms length, and climb into a shower fully closed because their child (I am not saying which one!) was coated in shit from their forehead to their hairline on the back of their head I can tell the good people at Pampers that their product is not in any way shape or form “Poonami proof”

We still get UK TV here through some service that at best is operating in a grey legal area, but when we watch something on ITV the most annoying song we hear is that one on the postcode lottery, “Someone’s knocking at my door, Someone’s ringing my bell” That is a proper ear worm. I was singing that for months until the absolute masterpiece “Pinching off a porcupine” entered my life. The looks I get at work now humming along or singing that song. Ironically it has meant that I have spent more time in trap 2 avoiding people asking me what I am singing.

And for those in the UK who can’t believe that this advert is real…. I beg you to please watch the below

It’s been a minute since I last graced you all with my incredible written word and I am sure there has been a hole in your lives that simply could not be filled. Well after a solid 5 weeks of trying to work out what the login is to get back in and type away, I am back to fill your hole…

It turns out I signed up to this platform with an email address that was weirdly specific to our previous life in Texas, but that’s all water under the bridge now, I am back in and ready to update you all on the highs and lows of our life over here.

So what has happened I can hear you all scream. High level overview coming up. We bought another house, renovated it and moved in. While this was over a year ago now I still suffer the occasional bout of PTSD when I remember the moving in day, how smoothly it went and how Laura didn’t raise her voice even once.

Our young children have become teenagers and pre-teens. It’s hell on earth. I love them more than anything, but what I wouldn’t give to have 5 year old Freddie and 2 year old Harriet back for a week.

After not being able to travel for 3 years we have become weirdly addicted to cruises. I sit and write this on April 5. We have been on 3 cruises since Christmas and when Laura gets downstairs in a minute we are looking at booking our 4th for later in the month.

Most importantly though, Laura has “taken a job outside of the house”. She works at a school, which even though it has been well over a year blows my mind. She literally hates kids, especially other peoples but apparently she turns into some sort of Mary Poppins character the second she isn’t around any of the Shroders. Other than that life goes on much the same, the usual meandering from crisis to crisis, none of which are all that bad, just enough to piss me off.

“What has happened to bring you back to us Dave?” I am sure you are wondering and if you aren’t I am going to tell you anyway. What has brought me back is Escape Rooms….

Over the last 3 years we have got in to some random shit. I already mentioned cruising, I contribute to a Boxing podcast now as well as make a dismal attempt to train and I am currently working on becoming a certified professional darts player (more on all of these over the next few blogs, they are all things that genuinely happen) but none are as weird as the strange fascination we have for Escape Rooms.

If you are not familiar, an escape room is exactly what it says it is. You get “locked” in a room with a theme and some clues and you have to solve a mystery in order to get out within an hour. Orlando has absolutely hundreds of them, all sorts of random theming, some really good, some rubbish, but we don’t care we go to any of them and take people with us when they come to stay. One thing I should say about these rooms is they are monumentally expensive. Think $300 for an hour and for $300 an hour I want, no demand we get out and ideally at the 59 minute mark. I want all my money’s worth.

Despite the fact we do an escape room on average once every 6 weeks, we are shit at them. We have never got any better, we never will and I am going to explain why we are so shit at them. Firstly until VERY recently, Fred honestly thought you would be locked in there forever if you didn’t get out. The level of fear he had going in there was palpable. I am not 100% sure why he thought this, if I did a bad job of explaining the premise, but for at least the first 12 times we went Fred thought we would end up like one of One Eyed Willie’s victims in the Goonies.

Secondly as a family we do not think alike at all in any single way. We go in there and you have to work as a team. We do work as a team, just the shittest team imaginable. We have shit scared Fred, worried he will never see the light of day again and not quite sure why we keep putting ourselves in this situation. Harriet, the laziest child in the world. Absolutely certain she is right on the first clue, never is then just sits down in the corner complaining she doesn’t have YouTube to watch. Then comes Laura, normally the foreman of the family gently guiding us in the right direction and never raising her voice (this is dripping in sarcasm). When we get into these rooms she becomes so focused on one of the 48 different problems we have to solve that she completely ignores everything else. Finally me. I am a logical thinker, like way too logical. If I can’t reduce a problem to a number or pattern I have zero chance. I work my round the room shouting at everyone. The worst type of teammate.

Finally we are absolutely shit under pressure. We crumble literally the second we get in there. Each room has some ambient music as you work your way through it and as you get closer and closer to time running out this music increases in intensity. I am not built to deal with that. The sheer panic I start to feel about 40 minutes in and then for the remainder of our time in there is akin to the feeling I got when I got made redundant from my job 5 months after Fred was born. It’s a weird mix of fear, stress and a feeling I’ve let everyone down. I mask this feeling like all good men by just shouting loudly and directing people to pointless tasks.

Every time we go in we have the same talk. “We are going to stay calm, we are going to be methodical, we are going to solve each clue in order and we are going to work together. Oh and Fred, you absolutely can get out at any time if you need the bathroom, or you just don’t want to be in here. OK? Lets go have fun!” Every single time without fail after 45 minutes I am snapping at someone to pass me some random tool or hold a flashlight so I can see a clue written in braille or hieroglyphics. Laura has her head 3 inches from a clue we don’t need to solve for 10 minutes, Fred is trying random codes on the door to try and guess the final answer and Harriet’s initial enthusiasm has gone the same way as her enthusiasm for the guitar, running club, Wednesday night volleyball practice and school work of any kind.

Typing this out I have started to wonder why we keep doing these, it doesn’t sound a lot of fun, I am about $4,000 in the hole on them, but in all honesty we weirdly enjoy it. We get out almost all of the time, usually as the result of MANY clues and as yet Fred has not been left in the room to rot. Harriet could take it or leave it, except the one we did that was based on a Grandma’s house, she would do that one again because it has a sofa she can sit on.

Most importantly it has taught me some vital problem solving skills that I can use in day to day life. If it wasn’t for Escape Rooms, I’d never have got the login for this website back!

It’s Monday morning over here and as I got up to go to work I had no idea how happy I would feel two hours after getting in my car.

The last time I left the United States was in 2019, October 2019 to be precise and that was to go to the Bahamas to get a new stamp in my passport for visa purposes. I haven’t been back to the UK for over 3 years and by default haven’t seen any of my family for basically the same time.

I don’t miss England, not one bit. I don’t miss where I grew up, I don’t miss anything about England. I don’t even miss the food anymore, I try not to miss any one thing about anything or place, it’s a coping mechanism of sorts. I do miss people. A lot.

One of the things that we considered when moving over here was that if there was an emergency, we could be back in 24 hours, we might not be there for the start of the emergency, but we would be there soon. The last 2 years we haven’t been able to be.

When we moved to Florida, we were never that short of visitors either. I mean we live in Orlando, people want to come here regardless of us living here, but we got visitors and it makes the missing people easier when you do get to see them.

COVID took that from us and many others in the same situation as us. More than a handful of people we know (including me) missed funerals of people they loved dearly, even more missed family members growing up. Grandparents not being able to see their grandchildren grow. I don’t pretend to be able to describe how that has affected each individual person or family, but I know how it has affected my family and I.

The world pre COVID was a much smaller place. 8 hours on a plane and we can be reunited. COVID turned the clock back for people like us 50 years. It kept families apart needlessly. At first for a few weeks, then months and as of September 19th 2021, years. Facetime and Zoom serve a purpose, but it’s not the same, in fact it’s far from the same. In many ways it makes things worse.

I like to have an element of control in my life, if there is a problem I try to fix it. I couldn’t do anything about this. Just put a brave face on and it will come to an end soon enough, hopefully before we lose anyone else or anything major changes. Laura doesn’t know this until probably now, but I wrote letters and emails to my congressman, I messaged the reporters in the White House briefing room thanking them for asking questions, I researched third country routes into the US. I tweeted the President, the head of the CDC and FDA. Shit I even found out the email address of the Head of the CDC and emailed her directly. Begging for an update at first, then for an answer as to how this was “Following the Science”

I spoke to my Dad about it this very morning on the way to work and how it was starting to really weigh me down. It was making me depressed.

Right now though I am not depressed. It’s over. In one hour and 17 minutes this unscientific, cruel ban on fully vaccinated people coming to the US is over. I won’t be seeing people next week, or even next month, but I will be soon. I can make plans, I can tell my kids they will be able to hug their Grandparents and cousins soon and while we still cant leave the US (Damn Visa issues!) the end of this is in sight.

Everyone has been impacted in the worst possible way by the last 2 years, everyone has a story of losing someone or something. I know my family, both immediate and extended have. Today it feels like finally after so so long we have gained something. It doesn’t give us back the things we missed, but it gives us a chance to not miss anything else.

Today, September 20th 2021, is a good day.

When I was a kid, someone fairly wise told me that one of the key ingredients to a happy marriage is to marry a woman whose Dad owned a pub. As an 8 year old boy, that advice didn’t mean much to me and I largely forgot it, until around the time I was asking Laura to marry me. She ticked every box I was looking for in a wife, 100% perfect in every way, except, her Dad didn’t own a pub. He did (and still does) own enough junk to fill one of those weird British pubs with bikes on the wall and flying ducks, but not an actual pub.

I don’t want Harriet’s future husband to have the same issue. If Harriet turns out anything like her mother, or grandmother, or even great grandmother, her husband is going to regularly need a drink or two.

With that in mind and Bitcoin prices through the roof, I decided that I was going to build a pub in my back yard and I wasn’t going to half ass it. As with any virtuous endeavor, particularly one I am involved in, it hasn’t gone fully to plan.

Regular readers of this irregular ramblings will remember we had an over ground pool in our back yard. Well we don’t anymore. It has been removed to clear out as much space as possible on our 640 sqft covered patio. That was the only part that went without a hitch…

My ultimate goal was to create a pub similar to one of those ones in Tenerife, where you can gamble on the horses, while the football is on in the background and have a game of pool. If you’ve never seen one before they are awesome. Combining literally three of my favorite things, alcohol, total guesswork gambling and pub sports.

Firstly we needed lighting. Nobody wants to drink beer in the dark do they? So I went to Home Depot and bought 60 feet of string lighting. Proper lightbulbs, that I thought I could attach to the roof and the side pillars to create a seductive ambience akin to that of an upmarket restaurant or high class tiki bar. Well the first thing you should know about this endeavor and me as a person is I am not “Handy”. My life goals have never revolved around being able to build stuff. My life goals as it relates to that, have largely been to earn enough money so I can pay a professional person to do it for me. I have failed in that, so I had a go.

One of the problems of not ever doing any DIY or building anything is that I don’t really know where to start anything. I rushed back with these fancy lights and literally no idea of how to put them up. Almost nothing I try works first time, in fact it rarely works second time, but it seemed like I had got this right, I was buzzing. In my head I was like one of Laura’s other guilty crushes Nick Knowles off of DIY SOS, fixing stuff, great singing voice, devastatingly handsome, in reality my over confidence was just slightly misplaced.

5 minutes after I had them up and sat down the world was a better place. 6 minutes after I had them up and sat down, the world was a darker, noisier place, littered with broken glass and mistakes. I felt like I was back in Canvey Island. The lights had fallen down and shattered everywhere. Fortunately there were only two people sitting out there, unfortunately one of them was Laura. I learned a couple of things in that moment. Firstly duct tape wrapped around metal poles won’t hold 32 light bulbs for long, secondly the sound of broken glass is a brief moment of heaven, compared to 15 minutes of Laura calling me dickhead for thinking that the first thing I learned could possibly not be the case.

Ultimately I did found a solution, but it cost me. Not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of my first bollocking of this project.

Lighting sorted it was time to move on. What sort of pub doesn’t have a TV? An outdoor TV ranks incredibly highly on my “Working class kid’s done well” scale, a scale that is basically the total number of inches of TV you own, divided by the number of rooms in your house.

I had a new TV, so the old one was going outside, I also had a bracket to hang it. $0 spent, just a bit of drilling and the jobs a good un.

Florida homes are made of breeze block on the bottom tier, which I would have to drill into, but one in three of those are filled with poured concrete. Which one do you think I drilled into? My battery powered drill was not cutting it.

Borrowed hammer drill in hand I spent 90 minutes trying to drill 4 holes into the side of my house. I have 100% got RSI from doing this. Finished it all, hung the 55 inch TV plugged it all in, sat back down and turned it on. Everything worked just fine, if you can ignore the 35 degree angle the TV sits at.

I sent a picture of the TV to a friend of mine, showing off that slowly I was becoming a sort of English Handy Manny, (as I wrote this I realized that Bob the Builder has already cornered that market pretty successfully, but you get the drift). Smugly sat, with my lights secure and TV on, my phone buzzed. It was a reply to my message, telling me it wasn’t hung straight.

No time to worry about minor things like that, the next step was to buy a fridge. Didn’t need a fridge, no need for it whatsoever. Purely there for show. The only thing that served literally no purpose was the only thing that I sorted without a problem. It’s sitting out there now, two months later full of Alcoholic Seltzers nobody has touched or will touch as long as I’ve got a hole in my arse

The actual bar was next. I ordered this from a company in Philidelphia on December 2nd 2020. As I sit here it is February 25th. I don’t have a bar. Apparently I am getting it in two weeks, but as far as I know the good people at http://www.homebarkits,com have stolen my money. I chased it today, the guy told me it had snowed in Philidelphia last week and that put him behind. I ordered it 13 fucking weeks ago. It hasn’t snowed for 13 fucking weeks.

Main focal point ordered and now time for the fun part. A draft beer system. This is in essence another fridge, with Carbon Dioxide on the back and a beer tap on top. You buy kegs of beer, put it in the fridge part and pour away your favorite pint. This is called a kegorator. It arrived a week late and set about setting it up.

Now whilst I am not good at building stuff, I am good at putting stuff other people build together. Usual man method, throw the instructions away, I’ll work it out. It took me two days and 124 miles of driving to get to the point where I could even attempt to pour a pint and when I did it was fucking undrinkable. It was like Jordan’s Only Fans account, 95% head.

It took about 13 pints of wasted Miller Light before I could stop throwing the froth all over the garden and get a proper pint.

It’s all starting to slowly take shape now. Draft beer, fridge, lighting, I am even offering food with a high quality griddle, serving pancakes, omelettes, burgers, a full range of high quality products.

Then came the pool table……

What sort of pub doesn’t have a pool table? It’s absolutely necessary, in my entire adult life in the UK I have never visited a pub that didn’t have a pool table and I am not about to start now. I didn’t want a shit one though, I’ve got some standards, I wanted a proper slate bed, level table. One that could showcase my unique pool talents.

We had a couple of near misses when trying to buy a table. The main one being when we got let down by a chiropractor. He text us as we pulled up to his house telling us he had just sold it. Fake doctor prick, a fact I may or may not have made sure he knew.

Miraculously though a friend of ours was selling theirs, so like an agile jaguar stalking it’s prey in the wild I pounced. Arranged for a company to pick it up and we were good to go.

Laura was home the day the table arrived, I was at work, but like all good businesses the company turned up 30 minutes early. A fact that was brought to my attention by the text message from Laura telling me I needed to tell them to “Fuck off for half an hour because she was putting the hoover round” This was the first of several texts and sweary phone calls over the next hour.

Unfortunately the table had some water damage on two of the legs. By “some water damage” I mean that half of the back two legs had welded themselves to our friends patio, I received a photo proving this and my heart sunk. Not initially because I wouldn’t be seven balling Fred that evening, but because the previous day I may have said to Laura that she couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery and now I was at work while 2 people with more limbs than teeth were in my house telling her that this had been poorly organized.

These two fellas just fucked off and left 800lbs of slate and wood in my garage, saying they would come back when I sorted it. I mean shit they work in the pool table industry, surely they know someone, but no, just fuck off with $200 and no help at all.

This left me with the difficult task of obtaining two pool table legs. On a scale of 1-10 on difficulty, finding two pool table legs is about an 11. Who sells individual pool table legs, especially the exact same ones that I needed? I tried to contact the company that built the table, they went out of business midway through the French revolution. I called cabinet makers, they wanted $350 a leg, I tried to bury my head in the sand, but Laura is a strong project manager and wouldn’t allow that. Well actually she just didn’t want all the shit in the garage, which is ironic really, because the spare room that was my office is so full of shit Laura is selling in her new business venture its like Amazon have opened their latest distribution center in my house.

Eventually I secured 4 legs from a company in Tennessee, just the two weeks delivery.

Anyway longgggg tedious story involving me getting shouted at, a new cloth on the table and Laura varnishing a ton of wood, the pool table is finally up.

That all being said, Jeff, if you are reading this, I have had your money in an envelope in my kitchen for 5 weeks now, I will drop it round! I was expecting Laura to, but as she regularly tells me she is the organ grinder I am the monkey.

So where does that leave us. I have everything in place now except for the bar. I have personalized glasses for regulars, beer mats, darts, even astroturf to keep everyone in top levels of comfort. I may have two wonderful children, a fantastic wife, a home, currently three cars, achieved everything I could ever have hoped for, but the day I finish this pub will be my life’s crowning achievement.

I even set up “The Lock Inn” on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Lock-Inn/105830004822973 Please rate and review!) I am taking this VERY seriously. The only problem is that it is now easier for me to get a pint than a glass of water. Every keg of beer holds about 80 pints, Since Christmas I have gone through 4 kegs. I have put on 15lbs and I have had a hangover for the entire of 2021.

It is far, far from finished, I don’t actually think it ever will be to be honest, but some time soon I will be hosting an official opening and sometime not very long after that I will be writing another blog moaning about a load of freeloaders drinking all my beer!

As I sit down and start to write this I am literally at my wits end. It is January the 4th, my first day back at work since December 18th and that day was my Christmas party so I was hammered drunk by 2pm.

What this means is that I am shattered. I didn’t want to get up when the alarm went off at 6.30pm, I somehow managed to drive with my one good eye to open up my office and crack on reading all the “New Year New Job” social media posts that pepper this time of year in my line of work…

My actual day at work was pretty shitty, but it is what it is, and I head back home driving about 30 miles an hour all the way because the sun is streaming into my only functioning eye. As I round the corner into my road I am greeted by every member of my family in the street screaming at something or someone.

I let out a pretty audible sigh as I saw this because I was tired, I don’t know what has happened, or what I can do about it, but I know that I am already over whatever it is.

I got out of my truck to see Fred now laying on the floor close to tears and Laura shouting “Poppy” at the top of her lungs.

At this point it is important to give some details on “Poppy”. For the last 10 or so years Laura has “gently encouraged” me to get a dog. A combination of us moving a lot and me wanting a dog as much as I want to go to the beach meant I had managed to give this literally zero consideration, however now we are settled and Harriet is old enough to bug the shit out of me about it every minute of every day meant I caved.

In February I put a deposit down on a dog in Tennessee, the exact type I would have been happy with, it also meant I had kicked the can down the road as the puppies weren’t coming until next February. Approximately 25 minutes after I paid the deposit for the new puppy, Laura started texting me pictures of rescue puppies dotted around central Florida. Another $100 I might as well have burned.

This continued for about a month and it is no exaggeration to say I would get 15 pictures of different random dogs a day… Eventually in a moment of weakness I cracked and two hours later I was in a parking lot the other side of town picking up what I was told was a Beagle/Lab mix puppy that would grow to 25lbs.

13 weeks later this rescue puppy weighs 23 lbs already and we are about 95% sure she’s about 1/3 of her fully grown size.

Also… This dog is a fucking menace. A literal fucking tornado of a menace. I try not to swear when I write these, but I have no other way of expressing just how fed up I am.

So back to tonight. Laura is screaming Poppy, Fred is on the floor in tears and Harriet could not care less. I survey the situation and figure I should go to my seemingly injured Son first. As I head over, my daughter explains that the dog has got out.

It’s the first day I have been out of the house in weeks. I’ve had a pretty crappy day and now the bastard dog I never wanted has got out.

Along with Laura screaming she is squeezing some sort of ice hockey puck shaped rubber toy that makes a high pitched squeaking noise. I am pretty certain that this is the noise that is constantly played in Hell. To the dog however it is like mermaids siren. She comes running in straight into the house to start what has now as I sit here been 3 and a half hours of squeezing this thing and making the noise.

Fred has survived the ordeal and is walking in complaining about acorns in his foot or some other nonsense and by the time I stumble in after my day at work the dog has entered a mental state that is tough to describe. It’s almost as if Laura has given the dog peyote.

All I want is an hour of peace. Just an hour to decompress after the first day back in the office. What I have got is 15 minutes of high pitched squeaking, followed by 10 minutes of incredibly loud barking because the toy is stuck under our sofa. This, repeated over and over and over and over again. Before I go to bed tonight, which will be very shortly because it’s the only time the dog shuts up, I have no doubt Poppy will piss on the floor. It’s almost guaranteed.

During the course of me putting this together the game has become Laura and the kids throwing the toy and the dog fetching it, if anything the noise is worse. I have asked several times for everyone to just calm down a bit and for some quiet, in what has become a futile shield held wobbily against the impending encroachment of the dog jumping on my head at any moment. I moved the laptop briefly to ask everyone to calm down and Laura threw the toy at my nuts. It still hurts, but apparently I need to “man up”

24 hours ago I was really annoyed that my time off had ended, right now I might go and sleep in my office.

It’s been a while since my last post and there is really not much of an excuse. I have been really busy at work, 2020 has been a bit of an asshole and I am sure everyone has stories and experiences from the year that are unusual or strange, so nobody really needed to hear about ours.

The main reason for the lack of content though has been my persistent illnesses and injuries, which came to an absolute pinnacle on Christmas Day. Previous entries referred to me detaching my retina in my right eye in March. This is an injury that sounds horrific, potentially can leave you blind and requires immediate surgery. In reality, the operation doesn’t hurt, the drugs they give you are incredible and the worst part is having to lay on your front for 3 days straight and having a gas bubble in your eye for 3 months.

Well I recovered well from that and had a brief period of time where I was as fit as an overweight, 40 year old with diabetes can be. I had avoided COVID despite playing fast and loose on the Casino boat petri dish of disease several times, I even managed a Christmas party or two in December. Florida gave up on any COVID restrictions about 15 minutes after the Chinese guy ate the bat, so we can quite literally go anywhere and do anything.

And so we hurtled towards Christmas where a fat man with a beard brings Fred yet another version of Monopoly we have to painfully play again and again, Harriet crying because she bankrupts Laura and then giving her all her money back so the never ending game can continue. Me head in my hands after 15 minutes as nobody trades, nobody gets any hotels and nobody wins, as I spend countless hours as the banker trying to convince Fred he doesn’t need to pay the $36 rent for landing on Vermont St in $1 bills.

I did however have some annual leave left in December so I took a couple of days off before Christmas and arranged a game of golf. The day came and it was the first “cold” day I had seen in Florida for about a year. By cold I mean it was about 42 degrees when I teed off, about 5 degrees for those in every other country in the world that uses Celsius. This is genuinely cold, not Florida cold, but actually cold.

Still thinking I am a sprightly 21 year old I raced to the first tee, skipping any warm up or loosening exercises and got ready to rip an absolute bomb off down the first fairway. Perhaps not warming up was a bad idea as I immediately put my back out.

It’s OK I thought, it will loosen up after a few holes and I will be fine. Ever the optimist. By the 12th hole I couldn’t walk. By 14, I was laying down after every shot, By 16 I could barely hold the club let alone swing it. But winners do not quit and I made it round, came second and hobbled back to my truck where if the heated seats didn’t fix it, a steaming hot shower would.

3 days later and I am at urgent care watching student after student come in asking for a COVID test realizing it wasn’t free and leaving, while I was wheelchaired in for x-rays. $400 later and a prescription for hillbilly heroin in my pocket I am shuffling out, no better.

When my back goes, it goes for about 3 weeks, so by my calculations it would be rough but by Christmas Day I would be OK. Laura hates it when I can’t move, she thinks it’s an excuse so I don’t have to put the vacuum round, but I got us a robot vacuum so nobody has to. What it did mean though was everything was a struggle. Getting up, sitting down, standing up. It all hurt and it was an effort.

Going to the bathroom was also an effort, and without going into too much detail number 2 had a whole set of difficulties. Firstly pulling down my pants. I can’t bend so it’s just a case of kind of wiggle. Then actually sitting down. The toilet is low, I am tall, its a slow strenuous process. Follow that with the actual act, which again is trickier.

Cleaning up after is basically like one of those 750lb people washing themselves with a rag on a stick, and then I have to somehow get my clothes back up to my waist. What might be a 5-10 minute process basically became a 25 minute process.

And this led to the biggest issue over Christmas……

Nature was calling and I shuffled slowly to the smallest room in the house. It wasn’t going well. Basically and again without being too graphic, it felt like it was coming out sideways. I battled on and just at the point where I thought the worst was over I felt it. A little “pop” in my left eye.

I managed to detach the retina in my other eye having a shit.

The odds of this are astronomical. Millions to one at least. So on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day I was at the hospital being looked at, tested and then operated on.

Ever the loving nurse, Laura took the opportunity to suggest if I ate more fibre then it wouldn’t have happened, but as I sit here right now, gas bubble in my left eye, struggling to see that advice is not really hitting home.

So whilst I avoided COVID in 2020 my list of illnesses, operations and injuries read as follows;

Cataract surgery x2, detached right retina, vasectomy, skin cancer, right bundle branch block in heart, two herniated disks and detached right retina….

I will definitely outlive you all!