Juvenile arthritis

I'm getting older, there's no doubt in that. Sometimes when I crouch down to play with the kids I get an audible click from both my knees. I put this down to a love of jumping off things when I was younger. Before all this trendy parkour/free jumping stuff came in, I was was wearing garish 1980's colours and jumping of the single story flat roof extension my mum and dad had built in 1984. 

I remember the line from that song Sunshine a few years back, "Look after your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone." I know I'll miss them by the aches and pains I occasionally have now days but I can't imagine what it's like for the 15,000 kids in the UK today that suffer from juvenile arthritis. Arthritis is something I've always associated with the elderly, I remember my great aunts hands getting twisted by it when she was in her 90's but one in a thousand under 18's suffers from it in the UK. Just as in adult arthritis, it causes inflammation, pain and swelling in the joints. So when Jo from Arthritis Research UK asked me to highlight their work and the plight of youngsters with juvenile arthritis, it certainly opened my eyes. 


It's a subject matter that's well worth having a look at because if you're not aware of something, you might not be aware that you're little one suffers from it. One is a thousand isn't that great an odd really is it?


The good news is juvenile arthritis doesn't have to ruin a life, it is treatable and having juvenile  arthritis doesn't mean that a child will go on to develop adult forms of arthritis.


The bad news is there isn't a great deal known about the causes of it. That's where Arthritis Research UK comes in. As the name suggests, they fund research into arthritis but they also provide education, information and training in understanding it and dealing with it to. After all, research doesn't help current sufferers.


Even if you don't think or imagine it'll affect you, have a shufty because you might be the enlightened person that spots it a friends child and frees them from the constant pain.

Up a ladder

There are few things I dislike more than heights. Ironic given I'm well over 6ft tall but there you go. A couple of years ago my tight fistedness overcame my fear and I spent a couple of days up a long ladder replacing our guttering at the front of the house. It cost the princely sum of £150 for the guttering and the ladder stay (a device which makes the ladder about 4ft wide at the top and a lot more stable).

Times passed and the addition of Fifi meant I didn't have the time last summer to do the rear guttering. This has come to a point in recent months where the rear has been leaking in the weather we laughingly call "summer".

It's not that I'm idle, I just appreciate that for me to spend two days doing nothing but DIY requires wifey to spend an additional two days doing nothing but childcare. It takes a day to take the guttering down and prep/paint the barge boards and a (very long day) to put the new stuff up.

So this weekend just gone it was remedial work rather than a full replacement job. The wind was gusting, the rain sporadic and the shorts of DIY were being worn.

Does my bum look big in this?

As you can see from the incredibly flattering picture the Chief Ladder Holder (AKA lil bro) took, I was up fairly high. Concentration wasn't aided by Fifi banging on the window shouting "ALEX ALEX!" at the top of her voice either.

Still, the torrent of water has ceased now and I didn't kill myself. That's two plus points!

High Speed Dirt!

High speed dirt was originally a phrase that meant parachutists who's shutes failed to open and had a rather unfortunately coming together with the ground.

But on Sunday it came to mean the boy and the scooter. The boy had a micro scooter for Christmas but its only in the last couple of months he's really come to grips with it and now he zooms along like something George Lucas has improbably computer animated in his latest abuse of the Star Wars franchise. He weaves in and out of people at such a rate and I have to have my trainers on to have half a chance of keeping up with him at full pelt.

He'd not had a proper off on it and you can probably see where this is heading already. It doesn't end well. A few streets down there are some large trees with roots that have damaged the pavement. When the high velocity scooterist hit one of these, the front wheel stopped dead, the rest of him carried on and the momentum carried him head first into the pavement. E equal M C squared and all that.

I have to say, in the past we've had odd looks from other parents as our lad has gently pottered around with a full cycle helmet on while their offspring don't but as of this moment I have never been so glad of it. The brim of the helmet took most of the imact and "all" M'laddo had was a slight grazed chin and a terrible nose bleed. The nose bleed was bad enough that it tricked down the back of his throat and out his mouth and initially I thought he'd cut his mouth badly too. It took him a little while to start wailing- the pain was probably above the recognition threshold. But he did.

I scooped him up, unmindful of the blood running down my top and ran back home with him, his helmet and his scooter in tow. The wailing continued.

The wailing continued as we cleaned him up and tried to stem the nose bleed. In fact it only stopped when the failsafe measure of an ice lolly was proffered. He's a tough little bugger.

Volvo S60 Naughty Track Day

Many many moons ago when I was a student we used to have an ace jukebox in one of the bars on campus. One of my friends commented once he never understood why someone put Fleetwood Mac's The Chain on the jukebox, and always followed it with the BBC's Formula 1 theme music. We roundly lambasted him for not realising they were two parts of the same song. We knew our music and we all loved cars, racing and most importantly racing cars.

And then the Sony Playstation came out, with Gran Turismo and hundreds of souped up cars that we could lust after. It wasn't fair, none of us were ever going to get to razz it around the Nordschleife version of the Nürburgring, and even if we did, it wasn't going to be in a Nissan Skyline GTR R34 (which thanks to Playstation became the poster car for a generation).

So time passed, cars were bought and sold, cars got steadily more practical and first a lovely wife and then two (mostly) lovely children appeared and the day dreams were put on the back burner. Razzing it around race tracks had progressed from Gran Turismo to Forza Motorsport 3 but they were still video game based.

Cue an email from the lovely Sophie who invited me to a Volvo S60 Naughty Track Day. There were a number of locations to chose from but no choice really had to be made- the airfield where Top Gear is filmed was one of the choices so it was there that I went.

I've driven Volvo's before. Every single one of them has been my Dad's though, from the 240, to the 740, the V70, the V50 and even his current C30. Never driven an S60 though,especially not a 300bhp all wheel drive beast like the S60 T6.

At this point I will interrupt myself and say Volvo have won. If anyone has £36,000 they'd like to give me I would buy a S60 T6 tomorrow, it's that good.

What's interesting is that the range topper is the only petrol engine in the range, the rest are diesel. Diesels come on a bit since I had a lift from someone with a Peugot 305 TD in about 1996. He managed to drive it almost exactly at the point where the turbo cut in and we pogo'd up the motorway for hours. I had a broken ankle at the time, it was a memorable trip. Even the much more reasonable D3 (£23,000) was a very nippy car, especially when you were almost sideways in it with an instructor.

The odd thing though is no matter how fast I was going or how I was throwing it about, the thing just felt "volafe" (a word of my own invention, combining Volvo and Safe to give that special sense of security you don't often get outside of a Chieftain Tank). In fact the only time I felt out of control was when I wasn't in control- Tommy Erdos (currently leading the P2 Le Mans series) was hurling the car around the Top Gear race circuit with gleeful nonchalance. I've only ever been faster round a twisting course once and that was in a taxi in Morrocco when the driver found out I had dysentery and he wanted to keep his upholstery clean.

Look at my shiny helmet

I've driven a few new cars in the last couple of years, ranging from hot hatches to 4x4's, and on to sensible family cars. None of them had the gadgets that the S60 did. The thing even has radar. Unfortunately it doesn't display aircraft or missile locks on a HUD but it does scan for other cars and pedestrians with the aid of a computer and camera in an attempt to stop you running people over. Everyone with the faulty type of BMW 3 series they sell to people in St Albans should have to swap it for one of these, it would make crossing the road on green man a lot safer (the "fault" with the BMW's is most likely the colour blindness of the drivers who can't tell green from red I should add).

Even with two small kids I can't see the need for one of the estates in Volvo's range, the boot on this thing is huge. 339 litres according to what I've just looked up, which is only 80 litres less than a V50 Estate.

Of course I'd never consider driving a S60 D5 with wifey and the two kids in like this. But if I did they'd be safe. If a bit broke while I languished in prison for the next 6 months.

I'd have gone quicker but the chap wouldn't let me put some heavy metal on the cd player. Ace of Spades adds at least 20mph to any car it's played in :)

All in all it was a smashing day out. Volvo didn't feel the need to attempt anything like a hard sell, they just let the car speak for itself. Even in my inept hands it felt good, high praise indeed.

Unfortunately I now want a Volvo. I'll have to have a word with my boss and see about upping the company car allowance a smidge. If you want to read more about Volvo's, have a shufty here.

Is it me?

When I move the boy out the way so somebody can get past him on the pavement before they ask or simply barge past, it often occurs to me that I might just be the only regular person out on the streets that has any manners.

What evidence do I have to support this? Well:

1. People of all ages, race and class don't appear to cover their face whilst coughing or sneezing any more. What's more, they get the right hump if asked to;
2. It's apparently now legal to jump a red light if you don't actually kill or intend to kill a pedestrian (it's their fault if they don't get out of the way though);
3. It's okay to use your husband as a place holder in a supermarket queue for 20 minutes and then barge past everyone else with a trolley full to the brim with cat food when he gets to the front. Queuing properly is for those unfortunates with children;
4. Lifts in shopping centres that clearly say preference for wheelchairs and pushchairs can safely be ignored if you are lazy;
5. Your sports car cost you enough that it is only prudent to park in the mother and toddler parking spaces to protect your doors. Mothers with toddlers can do their own thing.

I could go on, the list would be pretty much endless and full of petty thoughtlessness as well as down right rudeness but I wont. It would just depress me.

Are there any stupid people behaviours that wind the heck out of you?

The Tooth Fairy- out to buy on Blu Ray and DVD

Back in May we were lucky enough to go to a preview screening of the Tooth Fairy. Well time has passed and its now out to own from today. Since the film entertained the boy so much, we're probably going to look to pick it up since I think its good to watch a mixture of animation and live action.

It's a film we watched and enjoyed on the big screen and the impact shouldn't be any less on the telly.

The reality of daddy gaming

via Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com)

Helping me out

The Boy is a handful when it comes to getting dressed, getting undressed, getting into the bath and out of the bath and generally drags his feet when its anything he can't be bothered to do. I've recently started plonking him straight in the bath fully dressed if he messes me around too much in the whole getting into the bath thing.

This contrasts massively with Fifi, who strolled up to me earlier this evening with a fresh nappy in one hand and a dirty one in the other. At 18 months she already puts her trousers on and can strip herself down to her bare skuddies at a moments notice.

I own no...

....jeans. This has come as a bit of a surprise to me to be honest. The only thing that made me realise was the trouser hunt I went on after my pair of GAP cords finally gave up the ghost on Monday night. I sat down to bottle some homebrew and heard a gentle tearing. It wasn't a massive ripping noise because the material is worn too thin for that and this makes it unrepairable.

Farewell brown cords!

So yes, I don't own any denim whatsoever. How have I got into this strange situation? The last time a pair of jeans gave out on me, I hunted high and low (whilst humming the Aha song) for a reasonably priced replacement pair but they were all either £70 and really faded (like I need to pay a premium to buy a pair of half worn out trousers?) or incredibly dark and well pressed. So I gave up after an inordinate amount of looking*

I think it's probably time to buy some more trousers. The struggle of finding something with a 34inch inside leg and a 38 inch waist begins again...


*at least 10 minutes in almost 3 shops, it was a labour of Hercules style effort.

Lots of fresh food

My Lady Wife has blogged about the foraging we've done recently but I thought it was time I did another post on it.

As well as rummaging around in fields and hedgerows, away from main roads and crop spraying, for fruit, we also have what I grandly refer as our vegetable patch. I sprained my wrist earlier in the year building some raised beds. I didn't have an electric screwdriver, I built the whole thing by hand.

When we had finished it, the meagre planting we did looked a bit feeble. We moved a gooseberry bush, there was already some rhubarb and that was about it. Fast forward 5 months and the place is a jungle. We have raspberries, gooseberries, pumpkins, fennel, runner beans, corgettes, (an) apple, black currants and white currants. And a wild strawberry plant courtesy of Innocent.

It's been fun to look after and satisfying to harvest but the kids have had a lot of fun and education out of it too. Partly because we have a lovely Budleigha, we've had lots of butterflies, so we've had caterpillar spotting as well as snail hunts, worm digs and we've even found a large frog lurking in the rhubarb. The boy has actually had a centipede crawling over his palm, which is incredible given how he used to get really worked up at even getting a little bit of mud on his hands.

The wood for the raised bed cost me about 50 quid, there was another 20 pounds on screws and woodstain. The plants weren't expensive and since we have a water butt, the upkeep has been free. The whole raised bed only covers about 6 square metres, so you don't even need a large garden to have a project like this. Come to that, you don't even need to build a raised bed, I only did it as it backed on to the decking in front of our summer house.

Mind your P's and Q's

I've chronicled the early rises that Fifi often forces on us and you may have seen me on twitter from 5ish a lot in the last few months. I'm not about to say I don't mind the early starts either, she is now at an age where I can't watch breakfast news because she's demanding Roary Race Car at the top of her voice.

Her morning milk consumption has dwindled slightly too, down from two 9 ounce bottles before 7am to just the one. The nice thing now is that when I give her the bottle, she takes it with a smile and says, "Thank you my dadda."

I can just see how wrapped around her little finger I'm going to be in ten years time...

It's 8am on Wednesday

Have you noticed how I taper off on blogging towards the end of the month?

We had a very busy bank holiday weekend although when I look back on it I'm jiggered if I can remember exactly why. Perhaps it just seemed busy as we did some socialising until nearly 1am on Saturday morning and I was up with Fifi four and a half hours later. That's how I roll, in internet parlance.

Rather than anything big, we did the kids cinema club (£1 each to see Ice Age 3 is much more like it), mowed the lawn, went on an accompanied scooter trek with the boy, did a Christening, had a free lunch (there is such a thing apparently) and hunted for glasses.

I tried not to be too cranky due to lack of sleep and failed a bit.

Yesterday was a bit of a nightmare, the boy went to his Nan's (my Mum) and she trimmed his hair. And I didn't notice as he was all sweaty and a mess. I think that overstepped the line and it's made me cross but we do rely on the childcare she provides, so I've got to tell her off without losing the good will.

And to cap it all, I was the first person in the office today and I've already blocked one of the toilets.

I have a feeling today isn't going to get any better.