I crashed her car

I crashed the car, I mean her car!

It was my fault, hands up gov.  I was trying to beat the light, I looked at the light, it was green, I kept my gaze fixed on the light, I got through.  I checked my speed as I passed the crossing, I wasn't speeding.

I looked up, but too late......

smash, my fault.....*ooops*

Living with the pregnant

It appears our baby was conceived at the Windsor Hotel, Bath and our lives began a long journey, well trodden by many before us, but a unique journey every time.

Pregnancy is a funny condition, allowing for a wide variety of symptoms often hidden from an exterior view. A pregnant woman mustn’t empty cat poo from a litter tray so a daily task of the rather unpleasant kind is assigned to me. I now know the health of our cat literally inside and out, the many colours and consistencies of it’s little packages reveals a wealth of information and teaches many lessons. Don’t feed tuna fish to the cat.

The male of the species must be supportive in every way in this modern age, understanding why the way we chew our food can be as infuriating to women as a light bulb is to a moth in the dark.

Pregnancy for the male is a secret world where we march forward valiantly, confronting the new woman in our lives and playing second fiddle to the bloody cat, who I might add, doesn’t appreciate the shit shovelling we do on a daily basis.

The pregnant’s gone to have her nails done, I’m cleaning the nest….

My lovely car

2 years ago I bought a beautiful BMW, the best car I've ever owned. It is the 325tI model, the compact one, the touring international piece of immaculate engineering. It's been all over the place. Took it to Nurburgring where a lap was completed in about 12 and a half minutes, not bad for a first timer.

Well, for reasons best left out of the story for now, I shall be losing my beautiful car, probably to purchase a ford mondeo or a VW passat.

Oh how forlorn, my heart is crushed, the future of driving bleak.

Don't alter your breakfast at the Windsor Hotel, Bath...

We had a weekend stay in Bath last week. Overall it's a wonerful city with loads of heritage. You can spend a day in a naturally hot water spa, floating in peaceful comfort in a salty pool of green, skin cleansing joy, then you can have a look at the hot water springs where Romans would take a break from the harsh cold reality of their north western territory in the blissful hot pools. They even did it naked, women and men together, sounds pretty darn liberal to me!

But, if you stay at The Windsor for a rather high price, do not ask for an English breakfast and then alter the serving. I asked for the standard with poached eggs, but my girl doesn't like muchrooms or black pudding so didn't want that and asked for two hash browns with one egg poached and one scrambled. After about 15 minutes our breakfasts came out, I had ZERO eggs and 2 hash browns, She had plenty of mushrooms and a black pudding. We pointed out their error and proceeded to wait 50 minutes while they presumably hatched a hen, matured it and waited for it to lay 4 more eggs so they could retry the brekkie.

When it arrived we had what we asked for, with eggs poached to smitherenes. The yolk's were like marbles and the whites like silicon sealent. Still, we paid our £6 and burped bean flavoured gas for the rest of the morning.

Be warned.

Trip to Tunisia

So we took our first steps on the African continent and what a voyage full of delights and frolics it was.

Having arrived at the airport, got ripped off by a pretend airport porter and getting on the wrong coach, only to refuse the help of the hotel porter at the drop off point, I realised I'd left my camera on the coach, yes, the wrong coach.

So I needed the help of the hotel porter that I had just offended.  He was most helpful and got the coach driver on the phone and made him travel back 20 miles to the hotel to give me back my stuff.  He got a large tip due to my incredible relief, not unlike the feeling you get when you think you've just been convicted of murder and realise that it was just a bad dream.

So, Camera at the ready we went on our coach tour of Tunisia, seeing the troglodytes, various beautiful oasis's and eventually getting to ride a camel into the Sahara.  This was a weird place with lots of arabic hawkers.  I paid the equivalent of about £1.50 for 200ml of coka cola!  Not bad work if you can get it...

The Sahara hotel was lovely, better than our hotel in Sousse but we only had one night and we smelled very strongly of camel's.  On the trip back we saw many more oasis's and a waterfall in the middle of the desert that the Roman's had once controlled.

All in all we liked the little bit of arabic influenced Africa we saw.  Here's a video of our camel ride.

Pension Reforms in October 2012

These pension reforms that were introduces in legislation of November 2008were designed to encourage greater private saving.

The important measures in the act will come into effect from October 2012 unless there are significant changes by the coalition government announced in September this year. The review team is on schedule to report to Steve Webb, the Minister for Pensions at this time.

The Key area’s for Reform, that will affect employers are

- Compulsory employer and worker contributions to be phased in
- Workers to be automatically enrolled in a National Employment Savings Trust (NEST), a government introduced scheme
- A straightforward qualifying regime meaning schemes already in existence will already meet the criteria
- A government department compliance regime.

Workers eligible to be forcibly enrolled will be
- Any worker not already in a scheme
- Aged between 22 and state retirement age
- Working in the UK

Employers will have to contribute 3% of the employees qualifying earnings which is anything between £5035.00 and £33,540.00.

From 1st October 2012 employers will pay 1% and employees 0.8% (0.2% tax relief)

From October 2016 to 2017 employers pay 2% and employees pay 2.4% (0.6% tax relief)

After October 2017 employers pay 3% and employees pays 4% (1% tax relief)

This is in effect another tax, similar to National Insurance and therefore will complicate the administration of PAYE contradicting the government’s current consultation on simplifying the PAYE system.

more info at this is money

What google page is my site on?

Just found this neat little tool that lets you see where your site turns up in google searches when certain keywords are typed.

It;s pretty cool.

http://request.acerhosting.net/gTool.aspx