Review: Cars 2 on Disney Blu ray

Cars was unashamedly the story of Lightening McQueen but Cars 2 surreptitiously almost tells the story of his goofy sidekick, Tow Mata. Yes, I'm slow and didn't pick up the pun during the first film. The animation is up to Pixar's usual standard but the racing is really a subplot in this story, a bit odd given the fact it is after all about cars. The story follows a plot by a nefarious underground cartel to discredit bio fuels, headed by a mysterious figure who is, in spy film tradition, unmasked in the final scenes.

There are some great cameos, particularly from Michael Cain. Since Michael Cain can't really act, and has only ever really played Michael Cain in any film he's been in, it's great to see a Michael Cain car being, well, Michael Cain. He pulls it off brilliantly. The action sequences are as good as anything that's about and the visuals are nothing short of astonishing. Perhaps oddly though, our 4 year old didn't take a shine to it, he still prefers watching the original Cars. Our soon to be three year old though loves it with a passion and it has (temporarily?) displaced Dora the Explorer as her television of choice.

From a parents point of view, like any Pixar film it's watchable and even enjoyable but I'm with the boy, I didn't enjoy it as much as Cars. Perhaps it's the slightly heavy moral to the story; "Don't judge people on looks", but I must say I enjoyed the tractor tipping and general stupidity of the original more. That probably says more about the original film and how it was fresh than it does the sequel. Generally, sequels aren't as good as the original and that's not really different here.

Whilst the highlight for Fifi is undoubtedly Tow Mata, I must say the outrageously rude French F1 car is a particular highpoint for me. This did lead to a rather long and involved discussion on twitter about why it's always the French that get to be the comedy rude characters in motion pictures but I digress.

Cars 2 is available now on Blu Ray and DVD. If you're so inclined you can take Amazon up on their very generous price of £14.49.

My adventures in Abu Dhabi with Shell V-Power Network of Champions

Workingmums.co.uk- guest post

I'm obviously not a working mum, and a lot of mum's at the moment aren't either, thanks to the cost of childcare. Even though wifey went back to work after the birth of Fifi, the contribution after childcare costs she made to the household income wasn't enormous, and certainly wasn't proportionally worth all the stress and aggravation. Talking to a lot of the mum's at work, they sort of forlornly assume that plodding on is the way to assure that they still have a job to come back to full time when their children are old enough to go to school and they suddenly don't need a childminder any more. Our childminder is absolutely lovely and is really like a second mum to Fifi, they've been hanging out together since Fifi was about 9 months old. We're lucky in that until recently we've been able to afford this but thanks to the economy wifey has been made redundant.

Fortunately on top of the blogging she has also picked up various pieces of freelance contract work, some ongoing and some project based. This kind of stuff pays in cash, not goods in exchange for reviews or work, which is nice but it is hard to come by.

That's where in the round about sort of way I'm famous for, www.workingmums.co.uk can prove very useful. If you are a stay at home mum, they do have a lot of information about homeworking, and also a job board that currently has about 70 homeworking jobs listed on it. They also have an invaluable advice and support section that covers all sorts of legal aspects of working as a mum, ranging from being made redundant on maternity leave (exactly what's happened to us, to finding the right sort of flexible working arrangement that will allow you to pick the kids up from school without constantly getting the evil eye from your boss.

If you read my blog you'll know that I don't do an inordinate amount of sponsored posts but I had by happen-stance come across Working Mums when I was looking for employment related advice for wifey. So in that sense, it's well recommended.

Is your household's contribution being wisely spent?

I was reading an article on the BBC website called Tax: do you give more than you get? It's linked into a new series with BBC political editor Nick Robinson, Your Money and How They Spend It. Episode one is on BBC Two at 21:00 Wednesday 23 November.

It was an interesting article not least because it contained a calculator that showed our family have an estimated net contribution of over £5,000 a year to the country. This will of course go up a lot when the government kindly rob us of our child benefit because their IT systems can't cope with a married couple living together.In some sort of subconscious way I feel more entitled to have an opinion on what happens with tax payers money now I know this.

click for larger image

I know it's daft, and in this recession we're no more hard off than any one else, and a lot better off than some, but knowing that money is being wasted left right and centre (thanks mostly to following Roxley from the Taxpayers Alliance on twitter), a large part of me thinks, if you're going to waste money in such a brazen way, let me keep the bloody stuff in the first place you bunch of half-witted morons. And breathe...

On a similar note, it made me think especially hard of our local council, St Albans City and District Council, wasting an horrific £17,000 planting saplings down the road my work is on, at a time where they are making many people redundant. Apparently, on a road with 4 pubs and a history of vandalism late at night, this planting will make a "gateway to the city centre" from the train station. Of course what it will actually do is create a number of stumps and a contractor rubbing his hands together as he gets to replace them at additional cost.

Public accountability? You must be joking.

Legoland Windsor adds a hotel to the mix!

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to Legoland Windsor for a bit of an exclusive tour of the exciting new hotel they're building. I dropped the wife and kids off at main gates so they could be refused entrance to all the rides (one parent per one under 5 apparently) and donned a pair of steel toe capped wellies and a high vis jacket. Steel toe capped wellies are new to me but super awesome.

The hotel itself isn't open until the spring but the structure is finished, it's just the fitting out that needs to be completed. Fortunately for us there were a couple of rooms furnished to a more or less complete standard to give us all an idea of what to expect. As you can see from the photos, the rooms are pretty epically Lego. In fact I'd go as far as to say you had better completely exhaust your children in the theme park before harbouring any faint idea of getting them off to sleep. Theres Lego furnishings, carpet and wallpaper (in the premium rooms, the normal rooms get everything bar the wallpaper), Lego wall hangings, a locked treasure chest with a small Lego gift in it if you can solve the clues to open it. And that's just in the rooms. They're themed in one of three styles, Pirates, Kingdom and Adventure. One of the things I liked was how kid friendly it all is, the doors have peep holes at kids levels, the counter in the bathroom is low enough for children to use and the shower has a separate detachable head for ease of use by little kids.
 The lobby was a concrete and MDF shell when we saw it but the concept art was pretty easy to visualise how it would look. Pretty much like a Lego themed Charlie & the Chocolate Factory in fact. This is continued through to the rather fab indoor swimming pool. You might have guessed that since Lego have a nifty pirate theme going on, that this would be a good fit for the pool...

Prices range from £247 low season to £385 high season for a themed family room (2 adults / 2 children). This includes breakfast and park tickets for two days. Guests will also enjoy special Legoland benefits including early bird access to the park. Premium themed rooms and suites, as mentioned above, are also available. Annual Pass Holders will be eligible for special rates, although details of these haven't been released just yet. If you just turn up on the door at Legoland, you can easily spend £150 or so getting in, so in terms of a weekend break these prices look extremely competitive. They're certainly no different to somewhere like Center Parcs, the bonus being you get to spend all day going round and round on the Dragons Apprentice until you're dizzy and can't stand up.

The hotel opens in March 2012, but you can already pre-book rooms if you want to.

Wanting me just a little bit too much

I don't think I've spent many nights away from my wife and kids since the kids were born but when I have I've tended to be wracked with guilt. And it's not the sort of guilt you'd expect either*. Take this weekend gone by, I was flying first class to Abu Dhabi and doing all sorts of fun stuff- rides in a drag racer, hot laps round the F1 track and so on but I still felt dead guilty.

Guilty because when the plan landed at 7am local time, my twitter timeline was full of comments from my wife about how our two year old had been up hollering for me and still was. The UK time? 4am. I'd love to say this is a one off but it isn't. Even when I go out to book group once in a blue moon, I usually come back to find the boy asleep in bed next to wifey.

Some of it is undoubtedly down to me doing the whole bed time routine with the pair of them. I'm lucky enough to work locally so most of the time I can get home in time to bath them and read a story to them. It's probably more unnerving for them when I'm not there to do it than it is when wifey has gone out as she tends to stay out of the way and have a bit of piece and quiet while I get them ready for bed.

Most of it though, without a shadow of a doubt, is the pair of them being little sods. Wifey plays better with them, has more patience with them and is kinder and more understanding with them than I am. But the pair of them like to do the whole psychological warfare thing on her when I'm not there. Yes, some of it will be down to me not being there as much so easier to miss but even so, their response is daft. And anyway, after begging for me all weekend when I was away, sobbing all night, and generally being a pair of arses, what did they both do when I arrived home? Turned their backs on me, wiggled their bottoms at me and shouted "Poo poo Daddy" as loud as they could. They didn't want me really, they just wanted to play up.

Like a lot of Dad's, I'm not around as much as their Mum is, so a lot of the discipline falls on her since the kids are young enough (at two and four) that they need to be told off there and then for naughtiness but I do try and do my fair share of being cross with them when the situation requires it. Obviously need to try a bit harder going forwards!


* to be fair I would feel the "I'm doing something great that you're not" guilt if this other form of guilt wasn't so strong.

Pregnancy: a dad's eye view part 1

When wifey suggested I wrote a few blog posts with a blokes eye view on the whole pregnancy thing, I was initially skeptical. I mean, it sounds like the sort of routine Michael Mcintyre would do to a mixture of great laughs a bit of resentment. When I thought about it a bit though, I thought it would be interesting to see how it compares to other Dad's views and the adventure I had with the first two.

We have number three on the way as you might have guessed. I've told people that it took 18 months to conceive our eldest, 8 months to conceive our lovely little girl and about 3 minutes to conceive our third. That may well be an exaggeration, 3 minutes on a good day perhaps but you get the gist. In a twist of fate our third child wasn't exactly planned- wifey was desperate for a third for almost two years after the birth of Fifi and then gradually decided perhaps she didn't want another. So obviously about 3 weeks after that decision was sort of reached, we found out she was pregnant.

For completely selfish reasons, I'd never been that keen on having a third child. Two parents, two children and no one left out seemed to make sense to me to a degree but the most part of it was typical obsessive stupidity- things like how would we get 3 car seats in the car, or where would we store the roof box we'd inevitably need. I can be a right plonker at times. Of course that ambivalence disappeared when I knew number three was on the way but I still had my worries, fears and hopes for the little bundle of added family we've got on the way.

We went out for dinner on wifey's birthday, early May, and I think that we both knew she was pregnant then, although it was sort of an unspoken truth between us. Flipping heck, this all sounds heavy doesn't it? I think it was just so darn unexpected and it caught us both out.

So those are my thoughts around actually finding out that number 3 was on the way, feel free to call me all sorts of names for being stupid about it, I certainly have. Next up will be a post about trying to wrangle 2 under fives, a job and everything else when your wife is pregnant. Note: it mostly involves moving boxes.

My Dad, the silent type

If you've ever met me you'll know I have an opinion (or two) on absolutely anything. When I met the TV presenter James Allen earlier this year, he suggested I do a podcast because "I've never come across someone where even I can't get a word in edgeways".

In some ways I take after my Dad but in others we're polar opposites. I'm his eldest son and I love him fiercely but at times he can be a contrary bugger and as uncommunicative as a lump of stone. I spent an hour chatting to him on the phone the other day as I walked back from work. At 70 he's just brought himself his first iPhone. I hope he doesn't lose it on one of his 6 visits to the gym a week. That'd be sods law. We chatted about IT stuff, what they'd been up to and so on and when I reached my front door I said cheerio as I went to do some crowd control with the children.

When I got in and found my mum had called to say that they'd not be able to have the boy while I was away in Abu Dhabi this coming weekend because my Dad was having a colonoscopy after some inconclusive tests and he was more than a bit worried about the whole thing. I can understand a gentleman's reluctance to mention that someone wants to shove a CCTV camera up his bottom but it did bring back memories from a long time ago. The unspoken words were it might be colon cancer.

When I was a student at university in the mid 1990's, my Dad told me he was a long time sufferer of Non Hodgkin Lymphoma. I forget which type he has, I was rather upset when I was told, but it was a very aggressive form of cancer, which proved fatal in about 50% of the cases in the short term. He'd been suffering from it for years before he told me or my brother, he didn't want to disrupt our school exams or study at the time and afterwards the time had never seemed right.

It's funny really, my Dad has always seemed so grown up in my eyes. We had children when I was roughly the age he was when he had me, and I've never felt as competent or able to get on with stuff as he looked to me as I was growing up. I certainly don't know how I'd have coped with a condition like that, or managed subsequently to spend enough time down the gym to win a gold in the veterans category at the national indoor rowing championships- the only person there who'd never been out in a rowing boat of any sort.

I suppose I'm feeling a little bit morbid at the moment, I've been to my third funeral of the year today and I can't help shake the fear. It'll be all right though, he's my Dad and he's indestructible, just like I still am in the eyes of the boy and Fifi.

Why I wont be putting a "poppy twibbon" on my twitter avatar this 11 November

I've always been a supporter of the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal to support Remembrance Day. My grandparents generation where the ones that fought in the second world war and some of the stories I've heard are astonishing. But I wont be twiddling with my twitter avatar as a sign of respect, personally I think there's a danger that such displays of armchair activism achieve might not anything other than a warm glow for the person doing them. They're fine in addition to doing something positive, I'm sure most people with one have donated to, and I wouldn't judge a single person who's twibboned themself, but they offer an easy way out and I don't personally feel comfortable with it.

Whether it's these twibbon activities, or the endless Facebook petitions for causes, or requests to repost this or do that, it's easy to lose sight of what's important with any cause that's promulgated online. Remember the dead with reverence, care for the living and remember the Royal British Legion spend nearly £1.4 million each week carrying out our work among the serving and ex-Service community. Observe the silence but do remember the living- stuff those collection boxes with all you can afford or visit the Royal British Legions website, and make a donation online. Cheers.

Odd goings on at St Albans Library

I've seen some odd things in St Albans main library* (in the Maltings shopping precinct) before but nothing as odd as what I've just witnessed.

No dogs except guide dogs sign helpfully not visible

I popped in briefly over lunch to find the main reading area had a new"installation". Next to the microfiche readers, a middle aged couple had laid out a large tartan picnic blanket. On the blanket there sat a dog. The dog was clearly not a guide dog, being of a breed not associated with guiding and also being looked after by two people reading normal print books. They were reading normal print books whilst having what I can only describe as an impromptu picnic, complete with a couple of thermos flasks of tea/coffee/other hot beverage.

Now I realise like most of our other cultural assets, libraries are primed for closure in order to save money to pay expensive consultants to justify why it's okay to close libraries, museums and anything else that might benefit society, but surely things aren't so desperate that the head count of two (or three if they counted the dog) is necessary, despite plenty of signage to the contrary?

Neither of our kids are particularly fond of dogs, especially the boy after his Christmas mishap with one (wherein I was called "evil"), so it's a bit counter-productive to let them in where they shouldn't be in my book, never mind the picnic.

I know libraries have diversified into internet cafe and Blockbusters DVD rental territory in recent years, but I'm struggling to think of any vague justification of allowing pets and picnics to take place. Still, I have emailed Herts Direct with a query and shall update this post with their reply. In case you're wondering, all the staff were busy dealing with IT issues in the internet cafe section, and I didn't fancy waiting until there was someone free. And I was slightly afraid in that terribly British way of making a fuss and getting into trouble for complaining. 

*including but not limited to: security manhandling drunk tramps out, people taking their trousers off, Baby Rhyme Time going into toddler melt down, people cutting coupons out of magazines and so on.

Updating Wordpress Themes SAFELY

A good while ago I helped Cafe Bebe update her self hosted Wordpress site. Foolishly I updated the theme and completely stuffed up the look and feel of the place because the update was a bit broken.

Had I delved deeper, I would have realised there is a better way to update a theme.

Don't use the automatic update


The easiest way to update a theme is to click on the themes tab and click automatic update. As I found out this can lead to problems if the theme update isn't quite right. The best thing to do is to download the update manually.

Do download manually

Go the the themes tab in your Wordpress admin set up and find the theme you want to update. There is usually a link to the authors home page on it. Click this. You can see from the image that the details show a directory path to where the theme resides on your host. This will be useful later on. Once you've found the theme authors website, you should download the zip file with the updated theme in it. Once you unzip the download it's important to perform one check. If the download is in a folder called something like "Theme.3.1", you should be okay because each new version is given a different name. If it is called something like "Theme", you should change the folder name to something unique.

What we're going to do now is FTP the folder up to your hosted webspace. If you used a hosting companies "one click" or "easy install" to set up Wordpress in the first place, you might not know how to set up FTP access. Contact your hosts support, they usually have a really good how to article on this.

FTP stands for file transfer protocol but that really doesn't matter, most modern packages like Filezilla present you with an interface that's not much different from Windows explorer. After you've connected to your webspace you want to navigate to where your themes are kept. This is usually something like (/wp)/wp-content/themes. You should see several folders in there, including one for your current theme. Double check it has a different folder name as you don't want to over write it with the update!

The clever bit


Once you've transferred (FTP'd) the updated theme to the themes directory, it's time to go back into your Wordpress admin page for the themes. You will now see two versions of your theme there, the one you are currently using and a new one which will need activating. Activate the "new" theme. Rather niftily all the settings are kept from the old theme (this is because the settings are kept in the database and not within the theme itself), so you should be up and running immediately.

Play around with the new updated theme, see if it works properly, and if it doesn't, all you have to do is go back into your theme admin page and reactivate the older version. That's one heck of a safety net and a big enough bonus to make sure I never click the automatically update button again!

Credit where credit is due

Even in today's economy there are still some very good reasons to have your own credit card. Of course a direct debit to pay off the full balance every month is a must when you have a credit card, it's important to remember you shouldn't spend on a credit card in addition to what you spend normally- it's instead of. 


To my mind the biggest benefit of having a credit card is the fraud protection it offers you online. Yes, Visa debit cards do provide some level of protection but at the end of the day the money has still physically gone out of your account prior to you setting in motion the claim to recover it. With fraud committed on a credit card, it's down to the card issuer and their insurance to sort it out. The same goes for all those other places that you'd be reticent at whipping your debit card out- petrol stations, restaurants and even abroad.

I was talking to my dad the other day and he's now of the opinion the only really safe way to pay for petrol in anything other than a supermarket or Shell petrol station (they're not franchised, they're all owned by Shell) is with cash. Whether at 70 he's gone a bit over the top I don't know but I was reading a report in the Guardian recently that showed that card fraud for the first half of the year was a shade under £170m. If one person had committed all that fraud, they could have had a new Ferrari 458 Italia for every single day of the week for the 6 months covered. It's big money and Ferrari would have probably noticed if one person ordered over 150 Ferrari's. And then there'd be the issue of where to park them all.

I must be getting old

We had the boys first parent evening at Reception last night. I'm still not entirely sure where reception sits in the scheme of things. When I was a nipper, we had nursery (which I didn't attend) then years 1-3 infants and 1-4 junior. After that we progressed to secondary school with years 1-6 and an upper 6th for the A level sitting year. Simple. Of course now it runs all the way through in one unchanging run of numerical increase, but where does it all start eh?

Anyway, I digress, which is another sign of getting old I suppose. The boy had his adventures at the nursery attached to the school, slaloming past a couple of teachers to escape from the classroom and disappearing up the road on more than one occasion, and on his first full day in reception he contrived to enter a jumper cutting competition with one of his little buddies.

On these grounds we were a little nervous of what was going to occur. His final report at nursery was brilliant, we were told he was a lovely caring boy who showed empathy for all his little friends but things are a bit different in the school itself. For starters, for the first time in their 40 year history they've decided to have two classes all the way up the school, starting with his intake. They split the nursery class in two as well, rather than recruiting a new class to all start together.

Boys will be boys but he has come home with bruises all up his arms from being pinched and from what he's said, one of the other kids has developed the delightful habit of poking others up the bottom with his finger. The boy is very rough and tumble but we worry he's not mature enough yet to deal with people being properly nasty or spitful to him and that this might make it harder for him to socialise in a class with 15 to 20 new members.

So with all these worries in mind, when we sat down, I couldn't help but think: "My god, his teacher is young. She's the deputy head?" Maybe it was because she was dimuitive in stature, or quite quiet, but she didn't seem to be (and I'm only 36 mind you) old enough to be sitting in that chair having the parent teacher consultation with us.

Dadda "Two Poos" Cool

As I mentioned in a guest post I did for Erin over at dropped stitches the other week, one of the thinkgs I really wasn't looking forward to about parenthood was the poo. Other peoples poo. I'm not good with it. Not good with it at all.

Of course it's bad enough when the kids are little, sitting there wriggling around and generally projectile spraying poo at you at any given chance but once they're up and about, and talking to you, things take a turn for the worse.

The Portal of Doom

Once the children are out of nappies and a bit more confident, the problems really start. The boy was late to it all, gone three by the time he was properly house trained as you might say but Fifi has been going at it with gusto for a few months now. And the cries of "No! I want to do it myself!" are cute from a not quite three yet year old but the child then wants to get off the toilet and have a good look before bottom wiping occurs (and thank goodness she hasn't decided to do this herself yet). The problem with this is any bottom mess tends to get smeared all over the loo seat and her bottom. In fact yesterday she managed to get her hand in it as well, which required some considerable cleansing, as well as calming down a horrified little girl.

Still, these things are like buses and it wasn't more than twenty minutes later that the boy managed to spread it like marmite over his buttocks as he twisted round to have a look. I don't really blame him though, it was sort of my fault as I exclaimed, "Good grief, that's as big as your sister!" when I saw the size of it. No wonder his eyes had been watering.

Baths all round and a stiff drink for me afterwards...

The 4 year old decides to step in front of the camera