Life Without Toast - Sibling Rivalry

Today, one year ago, I was just after getting into my teeny car outside Matt and Nikki's and was about to pull off when my phone rang, my friend E's name was on the screen and I hadn't spoken to her in ages so was expecting a good old chin wag, when I said hello all I could hear was her sobbing. So was I seconds later. She had called to tell me that earlier on that day, our friend Peter had died. He had taken his own life. His parents had found him in the apartment he had shared with his girlfriend until 2 weeks previously when they had split up. He was supposed to be moving to Portugal in three days time. But he didn't.

I didn't run into the house crying, I was so calm. I think I didn't believe that it was true, or I didn't want to believe that someone who had been the source of a lot of my laughter since I had known them was gone. I didn't want to believe that he would do this, that he would willingly do something like this. He was such a happy person...and what about us? What about all of the people that he had left behind? I asked this question to no one as I drove home in a daze, what about us?

Posted by Babs at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every time I hear this it transports me back to Perth, sitting on the "gossiping seat" with my friend Laura drinking El Cheapo Beer and a bit of a chair dance (mainly pretending we were drumming), gossiping about everything, telling each other our life stories and laughing a lot.

Today, the cold, wet, windy and basically miserable day that it was, I really fucking wished I was there, just even for ten minutes, but alas it was not to be. I am going to Manchester at the end of this month to see her and I can't wait, roll on the 27th. Whoop whoop! (PS: I really hope this embedded because as you all probably know, I am pretty much retarded at anything computery!)

Posted by Babs at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm heading over to London this Friday for the weekend, mainly to visit my Good Mate Adrian of sevitzdotcom fame, and also to experience some of the sights and flavours of Londinium I may not have seen before.

So if you're in London (permanently or just by coincidence) this weekend, let me know and we'll like totally hook up. Adrian has lots of stuff planned, and has even created a Facebook event to help organise things, which are set so far to include drinking in a nice pub (probably in or near Wandsworth), drinking (and sushi) in a fancy pub/lounge, going to the Ian Fleming exhibition in the Imperial War Museum, and dinner in Ian and Nat's. If you don't know Ian and Nat, you really should. They're lovely people.

There's plenty of time for other stuff too, so if you want to meet up for a drink or a sambo give me a shout, I'll do my best be there.

If you want to join us, go to Facebook and let us know you'll be there. Looking forward to seeing you.

_{[photo courtesy Richard Moross]}

Posted by Matt at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Louise
20:23 so are you having a white wedding?

20.23 church?

Matt
20:23 no a brown one :-P

20:24 not church, humanist

Louise
20:24 me too. church sucks cock

I love the honesty of good friends. They're always an bullshit-free zone.

Posted by Matt at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This is for Turlough, of turloughrynne.com and this picture on my wall fame.

Dude, I just came across this. That's pretty cool! How cool would be if your name meant that (although I am, of course, the "gift of the Lord God Yahu").

And then I came across this. "The effect of the frequent flooding in the turloughs is to alter profoundly the character of the vegetation". :-)

Anyone else got an interesting meaning for their given name?

Posted by Matt at 9:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

So after a weekend of craziness and wonderful times I came into work this morning and found my lovely friend Eleanor in tears, she was in her boyfriends house on Saturday night and about 5 o'clock in the morning she woke up when she heard a loud explosion, she looked out the window and saw this:

Her lovely car had been torched by some dirty little scumbags, this girl saved so hard to buy her car, and she LOVED it, like I mean, totally was in love with her car, she had a special interior and special paint and kept it so clean it was unbelievable and to think that some little shits found it amusing to set it on fire and watch it burn just made me so angry, I still am, the whole thing is melted, as you can see from the pictures, its scary looking I think! What's worse is that yesterday during the day she went out to look at it and it was full of wood so they weren't happy with lighting it once, no, they are going to light it again tonight, to make it worse. Officially the worst Halloween ever!

_{[image posting done by Matt, because he's more brillianter at the HTML-ey stuff than Babs is...]}

Posted by Babs at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

I know someone, lets's call him 'Aloysius'*, who has a problem. For the last several years, he has been living beside some fucking scumbags, who seem to believe that his garden is a perfectly reasonable receptacle for their empty Guinness and cider cans and flagon bottles. Several times he has had his garden cleared of this rubbish, only for it to return soon after. On one occasion I counted upwards of fifty empty Strongbow (the preferred tipple of scumbags and winos) cans in one corner of the garden.

Last week, Aloysius (in an inebriated, angry state) flipped, filled up a black bag with these cans, and lobbed it over the hedge onto the neighbors path. The bag disappeared the next day, but the cans once again started appearing in the garden. Aloysius is now in fear of his life, or at least the cleanliness of said garden.

Aloysius has called, and written to, the council (as it is they who own the house next door, and not the occupiers, who are too useless and lazy to have actual jobs, and prefer instead to spend their days indoors, drinking and watching tv, and living off the dole), stating the problem, but has had no reply or result. Therefore it seems that throwing rubbish into your neighbour's garden is an acceptable practise. I wonder, though if we all started doing the same thing, would we get away with it, or would a hefty littering and/or disturbance fine be slapped down upon us. Maybe we should all give it a try and see?

_{*Names have been changed to protect the innocent. If you know the identity of 'Aloysius', please DO NOT reveal it here, or I will have to delete your comment.}

Posted by Matt at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Apologies for the lateness of this post (seeing as I came back from Wales on Sunday night).

Well, an excellent weekend was what was had in beautiful Snowdonia. I was there last summer, but only really passed through quickly, on the way to the English Midlands. We got the HSS from Dun Laoghaire (which was handy, as in 5 minutes away) on Friday morning and got to the caravan park (via a nice drive on the A4086, a really good drive, and at least two wrong turns that may or may not have been due to map-reading errors by my trusty navigator) at about half past four, just in time for several pints and dinner in the country club, followed by an early night (relatively anyway) in anticipation of a dayincluding 'a fair bit of walking'.

After a breakfast of pastries and coffee which had been cunningly purchased in Bangor on the way to our wheeled weekend abode, we debated joining the others for a hike up Snowdon. After looking at the torrential hail, rain, sleet and snow that looked pretty imminent, and our poor choice of non-waterproof clothing and footwear, and thinking of a 5-hour hike up a mountain and back, we decided (wisely) against it. So we went on a drive to Betws-y-Coed and a bit of a shop for appropriate clothing for future hillwalking adventures, some lunch, and to find a smaller walk to go on. We found a nice lake up in the mountains (I can't remember the name) and had a wee (2 hour or so) walk in the sunshine that broke as soon as we got out of the car, took some lovely photies, and then headed back to the caravan to chill for a bit. Dinner on Saturday was to be a gigantic pot of Bolognaise, made by Kabbage, (fiancé of Ciara, who's 30th birthday was the real reason for being in Wales, as I mentioned previously) up in a shack in the middle of nowhere, followed by several games of pool and copious drinking back at the park.

On Sunday we had to be checked out of our caravans at 10am, so we all (about 28 of us) headed out to get breakfast in a roadside café that Ciara had found would probably have space for all of us. After a few goodbyes and a look around the outdoor clothing shop that was attached to the café (every other business in Snowdonia is an outdoor clothing shop, you'll find), Nikki, Deirdre, Claire and myself (the Irish contingent) parted company with the rest of the gang and headed back to Betws (and yet another outdoor shop or three), and on to Electric Mountain. This was an excellent detour, a pumped storage power station deep underneath a mountain, that looked more like something out of the last half hour of a James Bond movie than anything I've ever seen. To say I was a bit pissed off when our guide said we had to leave our cameras and phones in lockers at the start of the tour would be a colossal understatement. The main cavern of the station is hundreds of metres underground (about a ten-minute bus journey down a huge tunnel in a bus), and is over 125 metres long, and I really expected a bald supervillain to pop out of somewhere and snicker maniacally at his creation. Visit Electric Mountain, it's cool.

From there we headed to Bangor (where it seems absolutely nothing happens on a Sunday) for some lunch, and on to Holyhead for the 6.30pm ferry back to the Pale. An excellent weekend I'm sure you'll agree!

Posted by Matt at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

As mentioned earlier, my Attchoo! Festival photos are now up on Flickr. For those of you (that's most of you) who aren't aware of the Attchoo! phenomenon, it's an multicultural arts/multimedia movement, which manages to mash pretty much any kind of art you can think of into one weekend, once every two years. I have been involved as a technical adviser for about 3 years now, and last year we went down to the tiny village of Glenmalure in County Wicklow and conjoured up a bit of Hippy Magic...

Posted by Matt at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

My mate Ste got a new dog, and him and his girl Gráinne dropped over to myself and Andy's gaff to introduce the new member of the family to the lads.

Her name is Uba, she's a Weimaraner and she's very cute. Remember 'Family Ties'? Remember 'Sit Ubu sit, good dog' at the end? Well Ubu was a boy, Uba is a girl.

Cuteness of this degree should be illegal. I mean look at it!

I won't tell you how much she cost though (hint: more than a hundred, less than a thousand).

Posted by Matt at 7:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)