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Tina has now moved out to live with a woman from work and her two young daughters, she will have cooking, washing and cleaning done for her and transport to-and-from work and for £30 less per week so she is very happy but sad to be going all the same. I am advertising again in the local papers for a professional person to houseshare and will post information when I get it. I am playing soccer a couple of times a week again, on Wednesday I play for the 'Die Hards' at Catford in a 5-a-side power league and on Friday's (normally) I play for Clarendon in an 11-a-side team. Mandi (neighbour) and I have been going out nightclubbing recently to 'Deja-vu' in Swanley (Tina comes to babysit) and taking the kids to the beach or shopping or to the park now the weather is getting better and generally having a good gossip with Kay (next-door-but-one) most evenings over a cup of my delicious coffee. My car is in for a service today, I need a new exhaust so I am paying £310 for a Mongoose stainless-steel one with a 25-year guarantee and although I won't keep the car that long I want it to stay in collector's condition. Next week I am having Zenith double-glazed windows to replace the five original one's that were fitted when the house was new twelve years ago. I have paid for the 'best' in the hope that they will keep the heat in, the noise out and not need replacing for some considerable time! The floor tiles in the bathroom have been replaced with high-quality lino from Beckenham Carpets, John Taylor has been doing some odd-jobs around the house and Ken Hilliard (my gardener) is getting the front and back gardens up-to-scratch for the summer. We are now moving in to my favourite time of year, Summer, with it's long warm evenings filled with with laughter and chat in the garden with the neighbours so I will post updates as things happen and hope you all enjoy the best season of the year.
After being spotlighted by a couple of popular websites I have received quite a number of hits (a silly member of the bt3a.com website community using IP address 132.185.132.13 forces upto 6 hits per second using a simple HTML meta refresh trick) in one day. I hope everyone who visited enjoyed the website and no-one was offended by a couple of the idiots lurking in my chatroom. Someone asked how I was handling my fame and I think my reply was a pretty good summation, "this isn't fame, it's the internet." As an IT Manager I have seen it all before and just hope that by visiting this site you have been entertained a little and yes, I hope you had a good laugh too!
2002 has gotten off to a flyer! Tina (my lodger) and I visited my family over Christmas and entertained the neighbors with a party on New Year's Eve. Work wise things are going very well as several new clients have signed up for IT Services and even friends of friends are now seeking my services (Hi Angela!) meaning that all in all I am very busy!
Several old friends have contacted me after registering at the Friends Reunited website. It has been good to hear from all of them especially Karen, (my first love) who tells me that she is happily married with two lovely children. I would recommend this site to anyone who has ever wondered what happened to old school mates. I have recently bought my dream car, an original RS Turbo with only 20,000 miles on the clock as it had been dry stored for over 7 years! I have had it tuned at Turbo Touch and they were so impressed they have asked me to accompany their cars to the next RS Club of Great Britain show.
Tina (my new lodger) has settled in nicely, she comes home most evening with lots to tell me about the day's going's on at McDonald's and is now almost happy to pay me rent (although deep down she does feel it's unfair of me to take it, I suppose that's a 17 and-a-half-year-old for you!) Beautiful smell wafting up the stairs as I write this, it's bread baking downstairs in the kitchen and making me feel hungry. Yesterday I heard on the radio that a hospital on the south coast had suffered a fire and I instantly thought of the lovely Lucy who is a midwife there. I wrote a concerned e-mail to her and was relieved when she replied saying that it was her hospital that had suffered the fire but she was far away at the time and is in perfect health apart from a cough and a sore throat! I am very happy, there are not many genuinely lovely girls around and Lucy is the loveliest I know. Finally for this entry I would just like to share with you a short passage from Captain Correlli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres. If the truth be known I found the first part of the book very heavy going indeed as it focused on the political situation in Italy and Greece during the second world war but when the Captain enters the story at page 190 and becomes entwined in the lives of the young and beautiful Pelagia and her wise old father Dr. Iannis, we know that the warning the doctor gives his daughter against pursuing a romance with the Captain (a member of the Italian army occupying their island of Cephallonia) will go unheeded...
For those of you who have asked after Jenny in the wake of the terrorist attack on America she is fine. This is what she has to say on the matter.
My heart goes out to the victims and their families, normal folk going about their everyday business on the planes, in the offices and the fire fighters and police suddenly called into action on a normal Tuesday in September. Life for over 6,000 of them ended that dreadful day and millions more lives have been touched by the evil mind behind this, everything has changed.
After advertising in this weeks News Shopper I received a phone call from Tina on Wednesday morning to say she was interested and would like to view the room. She visited that evening with two friends and moved in Thursday! All the little projects that had been placed on hold since Rosie (my last lodger) left can now be dusted off and completed over the next few months. I have made the decision to sell my car and get something more appropriate now I am not traveling all over the country. The BMW is a lovely car but having it parked on the drive as I only average 20 miles per week simply does not justify the cost any longer. I have already found a buyer and the deal is expected to go through on bank holiday Monday.
Things are improving as with the nicer weather and longer nights I have been able to get to know the neighbours a lot better and have enjoyed trips to Broadstairs on the south coast, ten-pin bowling at Bexleyheath, shopping trips to the BlueWater Shopping Mall and countless nights gossiping in the back garden over cheese and fine wine! Tonight I am going with Mandy and Kay to The Woodlands in Swanley for a 70's and 80's night and Saturday night I am off with Gary to a Karaoke! I'm dusting off my dancing shoes, pulling out my flares and slipping on my sequined shirt, ladies watch out! Work is going well, I have now added two new clients to our Information Technology Services client base so that will see me very busy for the foreseeable future. Sports wise I am hoping to find a local soccer team to join up with for pre-season training then battle for a place in the starting eleven each Saturday. The only sad thing in my life at the moment is that I am missing the friendship of one very special person. She came into my life bringing with her joy, humour, spontaneity, laughter, beauty, innocence and companionship but eventually for me a feeling of hopelessness and now she is gone. I think she must have been an angel...
As you know, Rosie, my last lodger moving out recently so I am keen to interview interested parties for the room over the next few weeks. The room costs £400 per calendar month and has the following facilities:
Shared facilities include:
My preference would be for a non-smoking female professional who would only need to provide food, toiletries and washing powder for themselves. E-mail me folks if you know anyone who might be interested.
Saturday 12th of May was a glorious day. The sky was a clean, cloudless crystal blue, the sun shone bright bringing warmth radiating down on those basking below and all was well with the world. I grabbed my guitar, camera and my copy of Birdsong and drove the short distance to Southend-on-Sea. The whole town was buzzing with people, the tide was in so I found a quiet spot on a grassy bank overlooking the sea, played my guitar and read some more of my book. As the sun began to slowly sink to the West the first 'cruisers' or 'boy racers' appeared in their XR2's, 3's and a variety of other hot-hatches. It was quite amusing watching them rev up their engines and screech along the seafront for three yards or so before slamming on the brakes as the extra traffic had gridlocked the whole road system.
As the families began to leave the racers flooded in, soon the whole of the one-way system around the seafront was teeming with these people, all in baseball caps, all with blaring music and arms nonchalantly hanging out the car window tapping in time with the music and trying to look cool. You could almost smell the testosterone in the air especially as all the local teenage girls were standing in lines at the side of the road like 'white trailer trash' egging them on!
I didn't see anyone hurt or any of the drivers doing anything really silly before I left around 9pm but I must say that I felt out of place in a shiny, purring silver BMW set against the backdrop of little fluorescent green and yellow cars, engines screaming as they crawled along, music pounding out of oversized speakers at 3 mph!
Lucy is approaching 24 years with the kind of reckless abandon that will surely transform into a sobering dread as the years roll steadily by carrying her inexorably to that fateful moment many of us have already passed, the day of our thirtieth birthday. She is young, vivacious, beautiful, has such a pure heart, a genuine innocence and an infectious laugh. This description though faithful cannot quite describe what it is like to see Lucy in person, there is one thing missing, the one thing that defines her and sets her apart from any other woman I have met, her smile... The first time I saw her smile I believed it to be the most extraordinary expression I have ever seen on a human face. It begins with a slow widening of the lips, then the pale skin of her face becomes radiant with an inner light that makes it shine. At last it reaches her eyes which develop squares of brilliance as they narrow into trusting humor and her whole face changes into something forgiving and serene. Our first encounter took place online a few months back when I entered an AOL chatroom demanding to know which of the women there were single, attractive, aged 24-32 and lived in the south. Lucy tells me she was intrigued at the arrogant way I interrogated her before finally agreeing to chat and impressed with my ability to communicate in this new medium. As a busy midwife covering shifts of 7am to 7pm with full days off making up for the unsociable hours it has been difficult to chat at regular times during the week but the hope of becoming real friends was nurtured in my heart and finally, after she felt comfortable with me she called me on the phone and we talked. We talked from 10pm till 8:30am the following morning! Our first, 'real' meeting took place very recently. I drove to the lovely Sussex village where she lives, (via the carwash) and as I neared called her from my mobile phone asking how I could get off the road quickly as I though I had managed to lose the pursuing police cars trying to pull me for speeding my way to her! Sounding a little flustered she gave me the instructions and as I brought the car to a halt I saw her hurrying from the house to meet me. When questioned about the chasing police I smiled, gave her a hug and said I had lost them but just couldn't keep a straight face and almost got a whack within the first minute of us being together! Lucy smiled. I am a strange person, different. Ask anyone who knows me and they will all agree. At times I can be overly sensitive, analytical, intense and emotional and she had warned me sternly not to say anything, 'weird' to her parents who already thought me odd wanting to meet them the first time I was meeting her. I just wanted to reassure them that I would be taking their beloved daughter to dine and would return her in one piece and alive, it was nothing more than an old-fashioned gesture of respect and seemed to pass without too many looks of incredulity. Lucy gave me a short tour of the house, grounds and observatory then introduced me to her younger sisters but seemed keen to show me her bedroom, previously a chicken hut but now converted into comfortable living quarters. As I entered she pointed me to the far corner, I made my way over and told her that I would need to, 'remove her top' and proceeded to whip out my tool. The casing on the faulty computer came off quite easily but as the fault was harder to detect she agreed to let me take it away and try to fix it. Lucy is not subtle or shy so you don't have to attempt telekenisis to work out what she is thinking, it wasn't very long before she looked me in the eye said, 'food' and we were off to the local pub for a meal. The evening passed well enough, the food was excellent and the locals got to singing rowdily, 'Lucy in the sky with Ben' as in their drunkeness they all felt I resembled the comedian Ben Elton. Lucy flatly denies it but I think she is used to being the men's centre of attention. She is very popular and was by far the most attractive girl there that evening. Needless to say I felt very proud to be accompanying her. After the meal we went back for coffee with her parents and when ten o'clock arrived, (Lucy was on an early shift next day) I politely said my farewells, loaded up the computer, gave her a hug and began the journey home. Next evening I got a call from her Lucyness thanking me for the flowers I had sent. It seems she arrived home from work and when her Mum told her to go look in her room she immediately laughed and asked, 'what has he done?' What she found was a bouquet of flowers containing a single red rose at the centre with a card from me thanking her for a wonderful evening. We chat regularly on the phone and are planning shopping expeditions, (as I desperately need some new shoes) a trip to the cinema, a pub quiz with her parents and maybe even a train ride to France via the Channel Tunnel! What, you may ask, are the chances of a romantic relationship? My reply is this. What I need in my life is friendship, companionship and not to scare anyone off especially after only recently meeting! Lucy is beautiful, intelligent, enchanting and everything any man could ever wish for in a woman and so much more. I am honored to be her friend and realise, maybe a little sadly, that someone like her will naturally have her gaze drawn a little higher up the food chain for a boyfriend than the lowly rung I am perched upon! To be continued... My lodger Rosie moves out on Friday 18th to take up a new position in Diss, Norfolk. We have gotten along fine and this morning, whilst discussing relationships, she told me I was, 'lovely' so it's a pity she is 56 and not 26! The search for a new lodger begins again...
Rosie moved in on Easter Monday and will be staying with me for a month or so before moving on to Diss to take up a new position there. She is 56 years old and has already started to make changes. Little pots of flowers have started to appear everywhere, there are some new seashells in the bathroom and a smell of lilies permeates the downstairs. I must confess that it's strange seeing someone sitting in my armchair. I have always aspired to have my own you see, a kind of throne where the master of the house sits to at the end of the day to watch a movie or read quietly. She told me that she was not an avid watcher of TV but every time I come home she is there, glued to my 29" with the surround sound pounding out! I have bought two new books as they were recommended highly by a really nice girl I chatted to for a while. The one I am going to read first is, 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks and after I have seen the movie will read, 'Captain Correlli's Mandolin' by Louis De Bernieres. If anyone out there has read either, let me know what you though and what I am to expect. I'm starting to feel a little restless. I've been settled here a few months now but am finding it so very hard to meet new people. I come home in the evenings and either watch a DVD or chat to a nice girl online but find there is a strong resistance to breaking away from the 'fantasy' life of the internet and into normal sociable relationships. I try to convince that I am a normal, well balanced guy, new to the area seeking friends but I sense there is still a suspicion that all men on the internet are serial killers, sexual deviants or both. The good weather coming I can feel it, and the fact that I live in a beautiful part of the country makes me want to get out into the countryside and fill my lungs with fresh air, explore the whole of the Bluewater shopping mall or even watch a movie at the cinema without feeling like a social pariah! Just where do single men go to meet nice girls? I will never be comfortable in a nightclub full of sweaty teenagers eyeing each other like they are at a cattle market and a nice pub is wonderful with the right company but going there alone and propping up a bar isn't my idea of fun! I am beginning to sound like a male version of Bridget Jones aren't I? Maybe there is someone out there for me... maybe she is looking out of her window right now at the same moon and the same stars and asking the same questions... maybe she should go to my Contact page, write me a letter and then allow herself to be swept off her feet by one of the last remaining true romantics... |
