Psychoanalysis answers on a comment please ... I just had a conversation about the weekend taking a long time to come around. I meant to say “Yeah it’s a drag” but actually said “Yeah it’s a slag”. A freudian slip if ever I made one.

My answers to the The Guardian Weekend Supplement Questionnaire which came to me via CoopBlog.

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being with my little boy, Sam. Oh, and his mum Cathy.

2. What is your greatest fear?
Losing them.

3. With which historical figure do you most identify and why?
I had chicken pox the day we did history at school.

4. Which living person do you most admire and why?
David Attenborough. He’s lived a fascinating life doing what he so obviously loves. He’s a real champion for the natural world. He’s brought everything from aardvarks to zebras into my living room and didn’t make a mess.

5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My Temper, ALRIGHT!

6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Indecisiveness, no, selfishness, no, yes, it’s definitely selfishness.

7. What has been your most embarrassing moment?
Too many to list. Many of them happening when I was pissed (see 32). I’m thick skinned so I only have short bursts of embarrassment and then forget it.

8. What vehicles do you own?
Sensibe car (Audi Estate), stupid motorbike (Honda Fireblade).

9. What is your greatest extravagance?
I usually spend a small fortune on skiing every year and a large fortune on motorcycling.

10. What objects do you always carry with you?
Wallet, house keys.

11. Where would you like to live?
The Yorkshire Dales, Lake District or Western Highlands.

12. What makes you depressed?
I don’t normally do depression. At the moment, apart from the war, I hate my job and the job market is crap.

13. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I’m too tall and skinny.

14. What is your most unappealing habit?
How long have you got?

15. What is your favourite smell?
My little boy when he falls asleep on my lap.

16. What is your favourite word?
Daddy.

17. What is your favourite building?
I don’t do buildings, I’m an outdoor person. A few years ago I went on an Open University summer school at Sussex University. Everyone raved about the architecture, I thought that it was an obscene pile of red bricks, a bit like the Midlands. Ditto the following year at Sterling, a concrete monstrosity. I was once dragged kicking and screaming from the beauty of Snowdonia one day by my in laws to visit Port Meirion. My mother in law asked what I thought. Vandalism!

18. What is your favourite journey?
The 271 miles from Edale to Kirk Yetholm, on foot. The Penine Way.

19. What is your favourite book?
Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore. Time to read it again I think.

20. What is your favourite fantasy?
Quitting the rat race.

21. How did you vote in the last election?
Liberal Democrat.

22. How will you vote in the next election?
Liberal Democrat.

23. Should the Royal Family be scrapped?
No, who would we have on the stamps? The monarchy should be scaled down.

24. Do you believe in capital punishment?
I used to but I grew up.

25. For what cause would you die?
Protecting my family.

26. Do you believe in monogamy?
I do, but I don’t think that we should cut down the rain forest to make furniture out of it

27. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
It was Cathy until Sam came along, now it’s both of them.

28. Which living person do you most despise and why?
You know him, he’s the bloke who doesn’t give a toss about anyone or anything apart from himself. He does and takes what he wants regardless of who he hurts, he plays his crappy music full volume, he drives like a twat, he drops litter, he thinks that the world owes him a living and he doesn’t look where he’s going.

29. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
“Patience my arse” said the vulture “let’s kill something!”

30. Have you ever said “I love you” without meaning it?
Of course I have, I’m a bloke. But I’ve grown up, when I say it now, I really mean it.

31. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I swear too much.

32. What is your greatest regret?
I spent too much of my life and most of my money getting pissed.

33. When and where were you happiest?
Now, with Cathy and Sam.

34. How do you relax?
I ride my motorbike, I go skiing in winter and I like to go hiking but I don’t make time for it at the moment ...

35. How often do you have sex?
I’m the parent of a toddler, my sex life is with the other parent so ... infrequently.

36. What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
No single thing, see 11, 34 and 35.

37. What would your motto be?
All things in moderation, especially moderation.

38. What keeps you awake at night?
I don’t lay awake at night worrying, I never have. Sam wakes me most nights, he has very vocal dreams.

39. How would you like to die?
Do I have a choice?

40. Do you believe in life after death?
No.

41. How would you like to be remembered?
My best friend Dave’s dad, Fred, was a great man. Not great in a Churchill kind of a way but great all the same. Fred lived a full life, he was an old sailor, he had a chest full of medals, he was a scoundrel, a womaniser, a drunkard, a smoker. Fred lived a full life and everyone liked him. Everyone who met him has a story about him. When people talk about him it stirs a collective memory, one story leads to another, you get different viewpoints on the same events, you can have a night out in Slaithwaite talking about Fred. When he died, his grandson James said “Grandad died, so they burnt him and everybody got drunk”. I don’t want to be remembered as being like Fred, I’d like to be remembered as Fred is remembered by his friends and family.

42. What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Look where you’re going!

Sam and I survived our first evening alone with my mum. Mainly thanks to Sam running her ragged all day yesterday before I got home, her ability to talk without breathing was slightly diminished. Well done Sammy, keep up the good work today and there’s a skateboard in it for you when you’re old enough. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mum to bits, but she can’t abide silence. You never get a chance to gather your thoughts before the next onslaught of curtains. Last night, it was crockery. I can imagine what a dinner service is made up of, I didn’t need to be told that she had dinner plates and side plates and cups and saucers and coffee mugs and soup bowls and desert bowls. “I’ve still got that old dinner service that your sister Carole bought me”, would have provided more than enough information. She does come out with some classics though, like “you can tell when they’re putting on weight because they feel heavier”. Never mind, it’s a pleasure to see her with her youngest grandchild and vice versa. I’ll put up with the chatter to see two people I love enjoying each other’s company.

Gratuitous picture of Anna Kournikova spotted in BBC news story about traffic cone amnesty in Sussex. Keep up the good work guys!

This is probably old news to a lot of you seasoned interweb surfers out there. But, for anyone who hasn’t seen it but has worked in a company with an IT department, it gives me great pleasure to introduce “The Bastard Operator from Hell”.

Via Chris, another mate who hasn’t got a blog yet.

On the subject of my time in Oz. Cathy and I met in an Irish bar in Sydney a lifetime ago. It seems like a long way for a bloke from Huddersfield to go to meet a bird from Southport but it seems to have stuck. I’ll go into the details of how we met another time. Cathy was backpacking around the world with the lovely Fifi Todd. The old travelling firm of Cathy and Fifi are getting back together (plus another two “Upton Park” friends) on a girls long weekend in Paris starting tomorrow. Zut alors, I ‘ope zat zey don’t find ze cake shop! I’ll be alone with Sam and my mum until Sunday night working on Sam’s Yorkshire accent by ‘ek! I’m going to ask Cathy to guest blog an account of her trip; it should make for good reading. No pressure Cathy but it’s on the interweb now so you have to.

I just read Brian’s posting about time and was prompted to write this.

I spent a few years living in Australia. One day I met a bloke, in a pub in Sydney, who was in charge of a luxurious ocean going yacht. We had beers, became friends and I ended crewing on the yacht every now and again. As skipper he had two rules.

Rule one: No watches are allowed to be worn on board.
Rule two: No drinking before half past.

Geddit?

When I decided to leave Australia (great country, great people, far too good at sport) and come back to England (great country, great people) in November 1993, I left Sydney and backpacked in a clockwise direction from Sydney to Darwin. My plan was to go somewhere, stay there, if I liked it stay some more and then go somewhere else. I pitched up in a place called Broome, a pearl diving town in north western Western Australia, for a while. They have an advertising slogan for Broome “Slip into Broome time”. In the case of Broome this is very true, time takes on a different meaning. I spent a whole day sitting by a pool watching a snake spending the day sitting by a pool watching a bloke. I planned to stay in Broome for a few days but stayed three weeks doing nowt. I had to give myself a big shake to get motivated to leave. Whilst I was there I met some great people. One of the guys I met was a very chilled out Aussie (can’t recall his name) but he looked like Bluto. He had two pieces of advice which I took on board and have kept. One of them was to never ask people what they do for a living until you’ve got to know them, the other was to never wear a watch. I never have worn a watch since and never will.

When I got home I had a letter from my car insurance company with this year’s renewal quote. The letter started out “You may have noticed that our name has changed from SBD Insurance Direct to SBD Insurance, this is not the only change blah blah blah”. Then on to page two for the bit I was interested in “we’re pleased to offer you a renewal quote of...” £200.00 more than last year, BASTARDS. I’m a year older, a year wiser (bet Simon can’t resist a crack here), had no accidents, no convictions and the car is worth a year’s worth of depreciation and mileage less. On closer inspection of the quote I noticed that they had half of my details wrong, they keyed it into their computer last year why isn't it still the same? I shall of course be telling them that I have changed my answer since last year from yes to bugger off unless they can do better.

Update: With the correct details, SBD Insurance managed to reduce the renewal premium to be only £100.00 more than last year. Famous Supermarket Insurance Company beat last year's premium by £11.00 and offered me breakdown cover at half the price of SBD Recovery. It pays t shop around.

I wonder how many wizard wheeze April Fool gags were scuppered by Blogger being unable to publish yesterday morning. I was quite looking forward to it all.

When I was a lad (cue Hovis music, Elgar’s Largo I think). I read a whole series of books by a chap called Sven Hassel. Bloody, but anti war (as far as I recall) novels set in the second world war in a style similar to that of All Quiet on the Western Front. The basic plot of all the books was that our hero, Sven, was in the 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment in the German Army (it was either that or get shot). He was teamed up with a bunch of criminal misfits, murderers, rapists, theives, general scallywags but deep down good guys. They had to do the very dirtiest of dirty work in different theatres of war. What they always did, everywhere they went, was plant booby traps behind pictures and statues of Hitler so that when the allied troops arrived and grabbed it as a souvenir or pulled it down, they got blown up. I cringe every time I see one of our soldiers pulling down a picture of Saddam.

Even if this blog achieves nothing more, I seem to have given myself a bit of a career wake up call with my posting earlier today. I’ve known for some time that I need to broaden my skill set, to become less reliant upon making a living from one particular type of technology (the iSeries), in one particular industry (the financial sector), to diversify, to spread my wings, to become, a lumberjack! By writing the piece below, I was pointed at The Pragmatic Programmer via comments and Your Knowledge Portfolio. I had a look and read the following talk which makes perfect sense. I shall be doing some reading, thinking and planning over the next few days.

When I started my blog, most of the other blogs I found were quite liberal in content. I mentioned this to a friend and was pointed at some quite illiberal examples. Nestled in a crack was arseblog. Funnily enough it’s a blog by (and for) arsenal fans about The Arsenal (side note, must see if there’s one for part time, fair weather Huddersfield Town fans). Now, I don’t know much about “The Gooners” but I do know that I have to agree with anyone who thinks that this geezer is a cnut, pukka!

Via my mate Tony who doesn’t have a blog (yet).

Today I are mostly eating moist carrot cake wth a yoghurt topping.

Sign spotted on the back of a motorway maintenance lorry this morning, “Not to be pushed by machines”. It’s a ten ton truck full of asphalt, "give us a push mate".

In the building where I work they’ve just replaced all the toilet paper dispensers. The old ones didn’t fulfil the role of dispensing toilet paper. You had to reach inside and fiddle about to find the end, the roll didn’t roll, you had to pull just hard enough to tear the paper in order to get any paper. It gave you one sheet at a time which we all know is USELESS. Guess what, functionally, the new ones are exactly the same as the old ones. It’s a triumph of design over function. You see it everywhere. You would imagine that if you’re going to task someone to design a toilet roll dispenser you would give the job to someone who’s actually taken a crap at some stage in his or her life. What’s wrong with a bit of wire and a wooden roller?

I’m an IT freelancer working mainly in the financial sector. Axes started falling last week at the company I’m currently working for, major cut backs are causing jobs to go. Freelancers such as me are at the top of the list (naturally). I can’t say that I’m happy about it but I understand market forces else I wouldn’t be a freelancer. Major companies are downsizing, getting rid of freelance and permanent employees in their thousands. Many companies are outsourcing to India where skilled resources are significantly cheaper that here in the UK. It’s not just IT people, it’s marketing people, customer service centres, human resources and so on. Everyone is firing, no-one is hiring.

So, who buys the products provided by these companies? The people who are losing their jobs, that’s who. I’ve got a mortgage, credit cards, pension, ISA (a good way to make a small fortune out of a larger one but that’s another story), life insurance, medical insurance, critical illness, income protection, motor insurance, home insurance etc. I go on holidays, subscribe to satelite TV, I buy stuff. All of the above are provided by companies who are downsizing and or outsourcing. Here’s a thought. If I lose my job and can’t find another, I won’t be able to buy the products provided by these companies, their sales will go down, they will have to save more money by downsizing or outsourcing. Someone else will lose their job, they won’t be able to afford to buy the products. Aren’t we seeing a marketing disaster here where companies are gradually making their own and each other’s customers redundant.