Out Of Office Autoreply:
I am awayfrom the office on holiday and will return to work (and blogging) on Mon 5th September.
If you require a blog to read please choose one of the excellent blogs listed a bit further down on the left.

Friday Fact #4.
I smoked up until I was 21.
When I was 18 my Dad had a heart attack, he was a 60 a day smoker, it nearly killed him. My Dad's brother had angina and between them they had a few other illness's such as lung infections and other heart problems. At age 21 I was smoking a minimum of 30 fags a day, everyday. I was heading down a road that didn't have much of a future.
"giving up smoking is easy, I've done it loads of times, Ha Ha Ha" this old line applied to me, I had tried before but never really wanted to give up.
So, why was I successful this time? what was different? well I had a real incentive, I didn't want a heart attack in my mid 30's and also I had been reading about positive mental attitude in an article in a martial arts magazine.
I officially gave up on my 21st birthday, as a present to myself, this was a Friday. On the following Sunday I had one smoke and then another on wednesday. On Thursday something happened that was really the key to my giving up.
I was driving to my Kung Fu class with a bloke called Vince who I gave a lift to,
"want a smoke Mick?" he asked
"er, erm, yeah OK" I replied "I'm actually giving up, but I'll have one anyway"
"giving up?"
"yeah" I said
" in that case you can't have one" he said coldly.
"WHAT!, come on don't fuck me about, give us a fag"
"no, if your giving up then I'm not giving you a fag"
there followed a moment of silence then Vince laughed and said "I'm just messing, here have one"
I thought about it, either I'm giving up or I'm not. Decision time.
"no" I said firmly "you can poke your fags up your arse"
I never smoked again.

"You gotta have faith"
I'm currently reading the Da Vinci code by Dan Brown, which is not a bad novel. It is an easy read that moves along at a good pace and is not too demanding and (depending on your beliefs) is based around an interesting theory.
The film of the book is currently filming in Lincoln and a nun has set up a vigil to protest against the book/film being filmed at Lincoln cathedral saying, "it is against the very essence of what we believe".
" The Da Vinci code is a load of old tosh" said the Dean of Lincoln cathedral, after accepting a donation of £100,000 to allow filming in the church. He obviously belongs to a different church to the nun, the church of filthy lucre.

Of course you could say that the Bible is a load of old tosh aswell and all of this plays nicely into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who claim the Church tried to cover it all up and discredit the theories, not to mention a nice slice of publicity.

I just updated my blog roll to include some of the excellent blogs I discovered whilst following Big Blogger 2005.
Some of the Blog mates I had read before but there were a lot that were new to me.
I'm off to read them now.

Like Kryptonite to Superman
is what diesel on the road is to Bikers.
There is a serious diesel spill on the route from the A13 down through royal docks road and royal albert way past UeL and city airport.
I was lucky. When I turned off the A13 at the A406 roundabout and went down royal docks road road as I leaned quite hard round the corner and went across the edge of the spill.
The bloke driving the porsche boxter wasn't so lucky further on. As I was waiting at the traffic lights half way round Gallions roundabout, Mr Boxster caned it out of woolwich manor way and off up royal albert way, I thought I heard a bit of a funny noise. The lights changed and I went off carefully avoiding the diesel and was greated by the sight of the boxter on the other carriage way in a cloud of dust and dirt where he had lost it and spun across the central reservation and hit the oppsite kerb. The driver was ok as he was out of the car and inspecting it.
I have reported this to Transport for london.
We all know that diesel spills are deadly so make sure you report any to TFL by calling the Street Faults Contact Centre on 0845 305 1234. or visit the website http://streetfaults.tfl.gov.uk/

Carry on Camping*.
What a fantastic idea! I said enthusiastically when my mate G suggested taking the kids on a camping weekend.
But as the weekend approached I started getting a bit nervous, the prospect of spending a night under canvas (it was nylon actually, but saying "spending a night under nylon" makes it sound like I went to a fetish party) was starting to get a bit scary. Alone, in the wild, just me, big'un and little'un with no support team (Wifey), it would be like a coming of age, rite of passage type thing. The kids might get something out of it aswell.
So, on Saturday myself (aged 40), Big'un (6), Little'un (3) accompanied by G (36) his two eldest boys (8 and 4) and another bloke called Fergie (43, I think) and his son (9) set off to deepest, darkest, Hertford (just off the M25 and up the A10 a bit).

The plan was simple,

• arrive.
• put tents up.
• have a BBQ.
• play games etc to wear kids out.
• throw sleeping chidren into sleeping bags.
• drink beer.
• go to bed.
• wake up.
• have brekkie.
• pack up tents.
• go home.

It all started to go awry when G's GPS led us to the wrong place (it was a typo apparently). When we arrived at the campsite I took the kids off for a toilet break while G and Fergie started to unpack the tents. As I supervised Little'un sitting on the toilet (he's just starting to get the hang off this toilet lark) I noticed that He'd managed to somehow wee on top of the seat, I realised that the angle of the dangle had been all wrong and Little'un had overshot the seat and wee'd straight into his pants. Disaster! I thought, we've only been here 5 minutes and already I'm involved in a toilet incident, all my worst fears were coming true. We returned safely to the pitch, with Little'un going commando.

Surely nothing else could go wrong? but bad things always come in 3's and the worst possible thing you could imagine happened. Yes that's right, one of the throwaway BBQ's didn't light! (we had to throw it away) and the fish fingers got burned. ( in case you're wondering why we would cook fish fingers on a barbie, it's because G's kids are veggie). By 9.00 saturday night it looked like the kid's would be putting the adults to bed as they were still going strong and we were shattered.

The rest of the trip went just fine and the kids had a great time. We went swimming at the Lea Valley Leisure Pool on the way home and later on sunday G and I took 3 of the kids to see the Fantastic Four. (3 film reviews coming soon).

This week I'm off on a training course for 2 day's so Wifey will be home alone, with 3 children for 2 nights, while I'm getting pissed, whoops I meant to say studying and stuff.

* much to our dissapointment a young Barbara windsor looky likey and a coachload of young ladies completely failed to arrive and start exercising in their bikini's. I feel cheated.

This has just been mailed to me at work from someone in the bikers mail group,

http://www.unityride.co.uk/

If you get a chance you should also visit

http://www.werenotafraid.com/

a tough call to make.
2 weeks after the event described below it has been established that the man shot was not a suspected terrorist. He was a Brazilian man who had no terrorist connections.
Although details are still cloudy it appears that he came out of some flats being watched by the police, wearing a rucksack and walked into stockwell tube station. When he was approached by the police he ran into the station and down to the platform and onto a train at which point he was shot. It remains unclear as to why he ran when challenged by the police.
What worries me about the quote in the post below is that it sounds like an execution, and some people are likely to call the for police involved to be charged.
There are many victims from this event and apart from the obvious ones, don't forget about the people on the train, who saw a man shot 7 times in the head right in front of them. They will never forget this.
The policeman and his family will be deeply affected by this and should also be remembered.
Now let's look at the event and the policeman's choices,

1. a man, of foreign appearance, leaves a building thought to house terrorists
2. he enters a tube station on the London underground where there have been recent bombings.
3. when challenged by the police he runs towards the train.
4. The police give chase and when the suspect trips as he enters a train the policeman has to make the call. All the questions below have one thing in common, the policeman with the gun doesn't know the answer to any of them.

• why did he run?
• is this man carrying a bomb which he is about to detonate? If so I have to shoot him dead.
• if he doesn't have a bomb and I shoot him it will be a terrible mistake.
• if he does have a bomb and I don't shoot him, lots of people, including myself could die.

The risk that he was a bomber with the will to blow himself and many others was to great. The policeman made the right decision.

I have deliberately avoided the term "an innocent man" as he must have had a very good reason for running.

The Brazilian man's family are obviously deeply upset at the tragic loss of their son but I can't help viewing their apparent intentions to sue the police cynically.

There is going to be a full investigation and if the police followed their procedures correctly and the correct warnings were shouted then it was a tragic mistake, if the police procedures were not followed then they need to make damn sure this doesn't happen again, it doesn't mean the decision to shoot was wrong.