it still functions

Plan A was to disconnect the battery for a while, and then re-connect it (the classic switch-it-off-and-switch-it-on-again manoeuvre). The problem with this was that the slag's alarm had drained the battery, so reconnection achieved nothing.

Plan B was to hook up another battery entirely - the one from my car, for example. This worked a treat, and after little more than twenty minutes of buggering about our beloved(ish) track slag was burbling away quite happily. Our escapades should have ended there with victory tea and Jambalaya, our mission having been successfully accomplished with ruthless military efficiency.

Unfortunately, whilst I was returning my battery to its rightful place (ie. my car) and musing on how nice it was that everything had gone so smoothly for a change, I managed to drop the spanner I was using; and instead of falling straight through the engine bay and landing on the floor, it landed on the splash guard and slid away far, far from reach...

So an hour and a half later we were still out there, with the front of my car jacked up whilst we debated which of us had the smallest and girliest hands and forearms (it was pretty much a tie between me and the RoboJew, as it happens).

When we finally retrieved the elusive tool, I further underlined my stupidity by forgetting to take away Matt's chocks from behind the rear wheels and reversing straight over them. Matt wasn't angry, as such; but he did use the kind of voice that he might use to oppress an entire race of people that he considered somehow inferior, if he ever felt so inclined.

Which I'm sure he doesn't.

Meanwhile, I seem to be tutoring English to an Iranian man. Mahmond is 45 years old, and has only recently moved to the UK from his home in Tehran. I feel like a bit of a fraud, on account of the fact that I am in no way formally qualified for teaching English, and generally don't know what I'm doing; but he seems happy enough to pay me for my time, and I have so far resisted the urge to press him for information on what it was like to live through the Iran-Iraq war of the early to mid 80's, so I guess it's going okay.

And finally... Toy soldiers have been absent from this piece-of-shit blog for a while now. Time to make amends. Here's what has been cluttering up my painting area most recently...

Yup, like a sucker I've been trawling eBay for classic/old/malformed/crappy models from when I were a lad, and now have a fairly sizeable collection of ye oldy space orks to scatter across the living room. This dreadnought is the first of the bunch to be completed; but I seem to have found a fairly quick way of painting them, so expect more photos of dated nerdy crap to be filling this space in lieu of any kind of meaningful narrative soon.

i learn it from a book

Hmm. I seem to be getting rather slack at this blogging malarkey... now where was I?

Ah yes, the wedding of Dr Sister and Mr Dr Sister. Essentially, it was a splendidly drunken shenanigan. There was lots of free booze and sweets, no-one had to get nailed to anything, and I discovered that I have loads of ghastly second cousins who are all anonymous to me, but all seem to know my name.

Pockets bulging with liberated sherbet and hangovers slowly fading, the Pixie and I fled to the New Forest for a few days. There we stayed in a delightfully tumbledown thatched cottage full of expensive tat...

...checked out some motorised roller skates from the 50's...

...and poked around a coastal fortress full of massive guns and dank rooms that reeked of unspeakable horror. The ice creams were nice, though.

Upon our return, there was car-poking galore as Matt, Laura and I (with the kind assistance of Sam, who fetched tea and hammers) set about further devaluing our track slag by taking everything out of it that wasn't bolted down, and a great many other things that were.

The net result of our collective efforts is that we now have a big pile of crap and a slightly lighter track slag that doesn't work any more. It doesn't work because an individual (who shall remain nameless) accidentally shorted out the car's electrics, possibly in an attempt to gain superhuman abilities that would make them so powerful that they could take over the world. All the people of the world would be united in their fear of their terrifying new tyrant-deity, and skies will blacken with the dense smoke of heavy industry as Mexico is destroyed to make way for colossal rockets that will propel our very planet into the void in search of new civilisations to enslave and devour.

This all just idle speculation, of course. We might have just cut through a wire somewhere. On the plus side, we found 31p in loose change whilst we were pulling bits out; so the slag is already starting to make some money back for us.

And finally, I had the viva for my individual project this week. I'm not sure how well it went; but it has somehow led to me helping an Iranian man improve his written and spoken English.

Indeed.