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.