So yesterday I was going through my ‘to do’ list and the next thing (well not next, but got round to doing it) was to book my train to Weymouth in June. So created a Trainline account, did a search, found the best deal and then bought the tickets, thought it was a bit cheap at £18. Then the e-tickets arrived, quickly looked and it said ‘child’, that’s why it was cheap. Go back on the site and there in the very small print it says ‘child’. So it doesn’t default to an adult ticket, it goes for a kid. So now try and modify the booking, you can change the time, the day (all for an ‘admin’ fee of course) but not the person. You could even add an OAP rail card for the child. Only option was to go for a refund, but after said ‘admin’ fee and the fact that one ticket wasn’t refundable the total amount of the refund was £1.45. So I went for that. Tried then to book the correct ticket, this came to £38. So had a look on Uber instead, exact same ticket was £30, so bought it there. Decided I was going to contact Trainline and have a moan. Managed to get on their live chat first thing. Oddly they were very responsive and after explaining that their website was a bit shit, they actually gave me a full refund, ‘just this once’. Bet I’m not the first customer to regress back to a child.

So this morning started early doors with a ride to the track where I spent most of the day doing a ‘First aid at work course’. Which was very good, I learnt CPR, the recovery position, pulled a babies head off etc.

Went home and walked the dogs. Then as I’d been sat on my arse most of the day I went for a very long walk. Now at one point I was crossing a very busy A road and a car turned right out of a traffic filter and came right at me, it was a green man, I hopped out of the way just iin time. This was directly outside a police station and there were several police cars in other lanes. She turned right into a one way system, the wrong way. Blue lights came on and he followed the car just over the junction and blocked it off before anyone came the other way. Now I do have a healthy dislike for the police, some can be quite nice, but most I’ve known or come across, think they are judge, jury and executioner and that they are way above everybody else. Case in point, I walked down towards the police car incase they’d like to speak to me, check I was alright or indeed take a statement. No, they were giving the occupants directions. Police bloke pokes his head out of the car looks at me and says, ‘yes?’. I said I was the one on the crossing at the time, he just said in a rather obnoxious manner, ‘We’ll deal with it from here thank you’, and just turned away. I just said, ‘Fine’ and walked away. Next time you bang on my door and ask me if I saw anyone vandalising the phone box across the road again, I’ll just reply, ‘I’m sure you can deal with it from here.’, and close the door. Twat.

Why is it done right? The casting is perfect. Joe Locke (Charlie) is openly gay, Kit Connor (Nick) hasn’t revealed his sexuality (and why the bloody hell should he), but if he doesn’t have a passing interest in boys there is no way that magic would have appeared on screen. And they are both seventeen at the time of filming playing a fourteen and fifteen year-old.

If you want to watch a very heart warming and non-cheesy bisexual encounter in a true love story you really do need to binge this Netflix series. It can be done in four hours, then reserve another four to watch the magic again. Plus Olivia Colman as Nick’s mum is magical and the bonus of Stephen Fry doing the sports day voice over. I really do hope there is a season two.

Amazon take note: Evan Hansen IS NOT thirty-five.

Bristol tools was a shop on Gloucester Road that was established in 1973. I bought a centre punch there when I was 11. Over the years I did a fair amount of shopping there, they specialised in hand tools.

But on August 31st 2002 (my record keeping is somewhat anal) I went in carrying a piece of brake cable. I asked specially for ‘something that would cut this’. I was handed a pair of snips, I then proceeded to cut the cable with them. The man grabbed them off me and said, ‘Sold!’, ‘I can’t sell them as new now can I’. I didn’t point out at the time that if I’d specially asked for a product to serve a certain purpose and it failed to perform that duty then I could get a refund anyway. I paid and left and vowed never to return. I didn’t.

I noticed when walking past recently that the shop went from a double unit to a single one and that it started to sell a large range of ‘tat’ including old vinyl records. A couple of weeks ago in passing I saw that it had vanished completely and all that was remaining was a mural painted on the wall.

I should feel perhaps a little sad that this almost 50 year old shop has now ceased trading, but then I wonder how many customers failed to come back due to poor customer service. It only attracted four Google reviews. Shed a tear? No, sorry you pissed me off. I still have the snips. It won’t be long before the mural vanishes and you will just be a blot in history.

Popped into town yesterday to the ‘Sound & Vision’ show, should have been renamed ‘Expensive stuff that does nothing show’, there wasn’t very much in the way of ‘vision’ apart from a Dolby Atmos demo which you couldn’t really tell much as the whole thing was with it ‘on’, so impossible to compare. What I did find amusing though was the shear amount of bollocks available for ludicrous prices. And people believing the hype. Now I’m not a cretin, I can happily hear the difference between a one hundred pound turntable and a five hundred pound turntable, I can even hear the difference between a five hundred pound turntable and a fifteen hundred pound turntable (not much), but I can’t make out the difference between a fifteen hundred pound turntable and a five grand one. I can also not hear the difference if you place it on five hundred quids worth of wood that ‘isolates’ it from the surroundings. It also makes no difference to me if you wire the speakers using cable that cost a tenner or cable that cost a million quid. I had an argument with a guy from a cable company, he was trying to convince me that my treble would be amazing due to the oxygen free content of his five hundred quid interconnect. I pointed to the amplifier it was connecting to which had the lid off and said that it was all fine, except that the amp socket was connected to the circuit board using 2p’s worth of Chinese coax. He didn’t have an answer for that. He could have got away with, ‘Ah, but that’s only two inches long and is isolated within the chassis’. The biggest bullshit purveyors of the lot though are those who sell digital interconnects. Providing the cable can transmit the signal error free, it really doesn’t matter if it costs two grand or two quid, the signal will be the same. So for all these hi-fi reviewers who say ‘the blacks looked so much darker and the colours more vibrant’, you are talking absolute shit.

I’ve worked out a way to make a fortune. I’m sure vinyl is designed to be played at a certain temperature. So I’m going to invent a fridge that you put your turntable in, so it’s at the exact correct temperature. Or for the full effect, offer to install perfect air-conditioning to reduce the whole room temperature down to thirty below zero. Your vinyl will sound great, but the increased treble will be over shadowed by the sound of your knackers shivering. But somewhere out there will be a guy with an Aaron sweater, loafers and an Audi who will spend fifty grand on it.

What the fuck is it with bathroom scales? They just break down constantly. The new ones I had, about eighteen months old now, stopped working completely, they spent all that time randomly changing between pounds and kilos, now they do fuck all. They seem to have a lot of problems looking at the reviews, the advice from the company is ‘do not use in a humid environment’, so awesome for a bathroom then. So dug out the previous scales which were in the other bathroom, they are fucked as well. So now ordered yet another make, gone for the ‘Fitbit aria’, wireless scales. No doubt these will be a sod to setup and breakdown just after a year. Oh and Pokemon go is fairy fucked as well.

So started this morning far too early, but it was fine. Had a quick breakfast and a coffee. Jumped in the car and made it to Staverton in plenty of time. We all sat in the front room, it was like waiting in a morgue. Anyway we all got upstairs after ‘Dick’ (Richard Mornington-Sandford) had got setup. We went round the table and introduced ourselves. I was the only non-ppl holder, everyone else was a qualified pilot. I mentioned that I took up helicopters after karting for ten years was beginning to take quite a physical toll. Richard then said that I’d gone up his list of people who will die ‘quite a lot’. I’ll rant on this in a bit.

Course, I must admit was absolutely fascinating, learnt a huge amount of stuff which will hopefully keep me alive. This chap is a bit of a male chauvinist, doesn’t like the French and not too keen on the Germans. At one point he asked who was married, I just didn’t go there….. Total respect for the guy though. He has survived an engine failure in an R22, twice. Has 20,000+ hours on all sorts of shit and is ex. airforce. There is one thing I think he was very wrong on though, and we did discuss this after the session today….

The assessment of risk….

He instantly thought that just because I raced karts, that I was a big risk taker. I don’t agree with this for a number of reasons. His point was that we ‘always drive on the edge’, that point is very much correct, but that doesn’t mean to say we haven’t assessed the element of risk. I raced a kart for ten years, never had a serious accident, okay then you can say, ‘oh well you’ve had accidents’. That in racing I’m afraid is unavoidable. Mainly because you cannot depend on ‘what the other guy does’. In that ten years, I had one accident that was caused by myself. That was probably close to 500 hours at race speeds. I maintained my own kart, I never ever had one mechanical failure or one engine failure, as far as I know I was the only team (There is an I in team) that achieved this. It was all to do with assessing risk. Does this part need replacing? Do I take that line through the corner? It’s all assessing risk. Does Lewis Hamilton have a death wish? Does he always put his life in danger? No, I don’t think he does. He does what great race drivers do, he assesses risk, he is not prepared to die for a race move. In a kart I built up the experience to be able to assess risk. In a helicopter I have no plans to do anything different. I certainly will never attempt to put a helicopter ‘on the limit’, because the risk factor is far too high. You have to operate within your limits, the important thing is to know where you’re limits are. At one point in the day he asked ‘How many people didn’t break the speed limit on the way up here?’. I was the only one who raised my hand. I left plenty of time, I was in no hurry. I could have belted up the M5 at 160MPH+, I didn’t. I plodded up the M5 at 60MPH, saved fuel and listened to the news.

We had this discussion. I did describe that fact that I’m so paranoid about dynamic roll-over that James has told me I’ll never get one, because it’s always at the forefront of my mind. I also described by ‘two part’ take-off technique which is the same one he recommended. I was very attentive and asked questions. He told me after are little chat, ‘I think you’ll be just fine’. Statistically, just by going on this course I’ve reduced my risk considerably for myself and my lucky passengers. I put my name down for the course, no one told me to, Captain James doesn’t even know I’m doing it.

So, yes, I know all about ‘risk’. I look forward to the second part of the course tomorrow.

This morning was mainly concerned with the joy of building demo data and debugging builds. It was dull but necessary. Had lunch, drank coffee. Read a book on iMovie during the dull bits. I now know how to edit stuff, this could be useful.

So the day was going fine. Got changed and went to the gym. It was spin. Paul wasn’t there, it was some lady. Anyway, there was only a couple of bikes left so I sat towards the back. Next to two ‘ladies’. During the warm up they were chatting. Then the class started, the hill climb, and they continued to chat. The music was fairly quiet, the instructor was doing her hardest to shout over it. These two woman continued to talk through the whole bloody thing.

“Craig, started at big school and someone took his lunch box.”

“Really, didn’t the teachers do anything about it?”

“Add more resistance, give it everything you got, push and pull now, pull your stomach in”

“No, he didn’t say anything to the teacher, but he came home crying”

Hopefully the kid will come home tomorrow, have a massive existential crisis because his mother talks too fucking much and wrap her massive boob tube round her fucking throat. Then may be we can all do the hill climb in peace.