rioja

Of course, it hasn't all been cocking about with toy soldiers. Although it has mostly been cocking about with toy soldiers.

There was also some cocking about with the track slag, which at the last check had a few issues with brakes. The scale of the problem became apparent when we removed the old pads.

For the uninitiated, the shiny bits show where the pad itself has worn away completely and the metal backing plate - which provides almost no stopping power but is very good at ruining brake discs - has ground itself away on the brake disc. As might be expected, the discs themselves were also a bit of a state.

I sure pity the sucker that had to drive that home from the track. (thanks Laura...)

So, new pads and discs all round. We decided after the last jolly that uprating the brakes was probably a smart idea anyway, and so after a day of excessive hammer usage we now have bigger discs and fancy red brake pads. These will make the car go faster, because they are red, and everyone knows that red 'uns go faster.

There was also a lot of cocking about with graduation ceremonies. Because graduating was less interesting to me than essential car maintenance, I took fewer photos. In fact I took only one photograph the whole day, of the bread boat captained by a grapey pirate that Dr Sister constructed using only bits of her ploughman's lunch.

So you'll have to invent pictures in your head using the power of mental thinking to accompany the following bullet point summary of the day.

• Apoplectic scheduling anxiety in the morning, despite going through everything the night before using a D20 to determine how punctual/sober/clothed people would be. Miscellaneous toy soldiers were used to represent all the important people, with coasters used to represent key locations and pieces of shortbread used to represent pudding.
• The Pixie looked delightful in her summery dress.
• I shook some old geezers hand, and now I'm qualified to do stuff.
• Lunch, beer, etc.
• We went to the aquarium. There were lots of fish, but no oversized pencils in the gift shop.
• Big Chinese dinner, beer, etc.

Essentially, the day started stressfully; but got immediately and immeasurably better once the ceremony was done and complimentary booze and cakes was made available .

scud panther

Well, that was nearly it for university. On Friday I was suckered into attending the faculty degree show, a chance for students to show off work that they had little remaining enthusiasm for to other academics and a smattering of industry professionals, who would feign interest but were really only there for the free food and drink. The engineering bit looked like this.

Pretty wild. For a while I killed time by watching the F1 practice on my laptop; but then the wireless connection inexplicably dropped out, and I was forced to focus my attention on other stuff. Mostly I concentrated on not talking to people, by scampering off as soon as it looked like someone might want to talk to me about my project. This meant I got plenty of opportunity to wander around all the other project displays for the creative product design and architecture programmes, and discover that for all the years I'd spent cocking about with rubbish brackets and complex equations they'd been having fun making awesome models out of bits of card and stuff.

Bastards. I would have attempted to drink my way through the rest of the event but for the fact that I had elected to drive there. This turned out to be something of a mixed blessing, partly because of the torrential rain that, had I elected to cycle, would have necessitated the use of spear fishing goggles and possibly one of those rubber rings with a duck's head on the front; but mainly because of the offensive quality of mojito on offer. When I am king of the world, I will have people sent to the gulags for using chopped mint to make mojitos.

I eventually returned to the engineering project room to collect the prize for Best MEng Mechanical Engineering Project, which was awarded to me largely because I was the only MEng mech student there. Whilst final marks and the quality of the project display were all important factors, it had already been made quite clear that attendance was also a key requirement. Which is good, because I have always considered winning on a technicality to be the sweetest of victories, and couldn't bear the thought that I might have won purely on merit. And they only slightly misspelled my name on the certificate and cheque, so really the whole event couldn't have been much more perfect.

The very best way to round the evening off would have been to go home and have a few drinks whilst my Chaos team cruised to a long overdue first win against Matt, who seems to think that his borrowed human team keeps losing because Blood Bowl is rubbish, and not because he is rubbish at Blood Bowl.

What happened instead was that my Chaos team slumped to a humiliating 3-1 defeat against Matt, who believes now more than ever that Blood Bowl is not some kind of Jewish conspiracy against him.

And so I find myself increasing looking ahead towards the next gaming shenanigan, which most of us have agreed should be Mordheim.

I plan to run with a Possessed warband, but haven't really worked out what I want to have in it yet; so I've just concentrated on painting a random assortment of bearded lunatics and gribbly mutants instead.

Like my Chaos team, the Possessed have a lot of muscle but little discernible talent and so are sure to do well.

And so that is, pretty much, it.

Assuming of course that I haven't utterly fucked up one, some or all of the exams/bits of coursework that have yet to have marks published. Which I probably haven't, but optimism was never one of my most defining characteristics.

In the meantime, my days are now largely filled with cups of tea, miscellaneous toy soldier tinkering and playing games of Blood Bowl against an artificial intelligence that only lives up to 50% of its job title.

And now: bullet points. You love 'em as much as I do. Don't even try to pretend otherwise.

• Gigs 'n' that: went to rather a lot of very splendid electronic music recitals whilst I should have been too busy with other more important things. Amongst others I saw Keelhaul, Knut, Zonderhoof, And So I Watch You From Afar, Shapes, earthtone9 and Humanfly. All of which were awesome, even if at the ASIWYFA gig I got kicked in the jaw so hard that I couldn't eat properly for two days.
• Moved house. The mice and I are now lurking about in the Nerd Tower with the Pixie and Dom. Which is great, except that this particular bit of Bristol (Westbury-on-Trym) is like one gigantic assisted living community. I am literally too loud for this place; so as soon as we can find somewhere else that we can all agree on, I shall be moving again. This may take some time.
• Much to the surprise of everyone - not least the mechanics who tested it - the track slag passed its MOT, needing only a replacement pump for the windscreen washers. Coolest advisory ever: "Interior stripped out, no rear seats or seat belts fitted." Like we might not have noticed... Looking forward to another full year of near-death motoring.

• We finally won the pub quiz again last night. For over a year the Luncheon Club has been dedicated to the destruction of noble gases (apart from a single week, in which we attempted to make reparations with noble gases). Now we can pick something even more inexplicable/pretentious/nerdy to destroy.
• Finished painting my Chaos Blood Bowl team in between endless/pointless finite element analysis simulations of suspension wishbones. I'd always wished that Matt liked Blood Bowl as much as I do; and now my wish has come true. I hate Blood Bowl. My Chaos team has so far proven itself to be awful at every aspect of the game, and is firmly planted at the bottom of our league table behind teams run by war criminals, sex pests and Victorian moustache wax connoisseurs. Friday games nights are now characterised by despairing sighs, the urge to drink heavily, and frequent use of the phrase BLOOD BOWL IS CUNT. Despite this, I still secretly love Blood Bowl; and I'm quite happy with how my new toys look.

• Got turned on to an epic dubstep re-working of Jeff Wayne's musical based on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. AWESOME.

futility room

• Went to gay man's house dressed as Captain Scarlet. Everything that has happened previous to this is little more than a footnote.
• Fire, and lots of it.
• Saw Dillinger Escape Plan (awesome) supported by Rolo Tomassi (also awesome) and The Ocean (derivative German metalcore wankery).
• Churchill and Chu proposed the following correlation for laminar free convection (where Ra is less than 10 to the power of 9);

• Mouses are alright.

coursework coursework coursework

I'M TAKING THE HYDRAPLANE TO BELLINGHAM

life-work-school-procrastination balance

So what's happening is this.

I finished my fuel-saving aerodynamics research/playing minesweeper job a couple of weeks ago. The boss was very happy with the work that I did, primarily because he doesn't know how much time I spent playing minesweeper. He's going to go over the stuff I did and present it to the university, with a view to conjuring up some kind of engineering get-rich-quick scheme. If he's successful, and if the funding is available, I'm straight back in there with some kind of part-time job; which would be cool, because his various motorsport contacts make him a very useful guy to know... but for now at least, it's done, and I no longer have fevered dreams about gleaming white DAF XFs.

Mmmm... articulated...

Pretty much as soon as that ended, school started. Now, I always knew that the final year of an MEng would be hard work; but there's knowing, and there's KNOWING. And now I fucking KNOW how much work I have to do this year, and it's more than a little overwhelming and, frankly, terrifying. Almost ninety percent of the mark this year comes from coursework, and to get it all done to a decent standard I will need more time.

So I've decided to try to drop one of the two days a week that I spend slaving away at The Big Gay Department Store; and if they don't go for that, I guess I'll be dropping both days. I don't really want to quit outright, as I need money for shiny things (and food, I suppose); but at the same time, I need to be able to find some sort of balance between attempting to master engineering, being a slightly camp sales assistant, and indulging in other social activities. Like checking out painfully contemporary jazz and drinking fancy beer on a boat, for example.

Which, by an astonishing coincidence, is exactly what happened on Friday when Sam invited us to The Grain Barge to check out his workmate's band. The band in question was Eyebrow, a thoroughly decent modern jazz two-piece consisting of drums, trumpet and a lot of reverb. They were cool.

The second band were called Busnoys, and they sounded like this.

Possibly the band that the phrase "Spiralling vibraphone wankery" was made for. But the important thing is, Eyebrow were cool and the beer was fancy.

swivel-eyed

I recently served a mad woman in the Big Gay Department Store. The conversation went something like this.

"Hello darling. Does this come in a box?" She's brandishing a frying pan.

"I'm afraid not madam, it comes as is. I could wrap it in some bubble wrap for you...?"

"That would be wonderful darling, thank you." I set to expertly smothering her shiny new cookware in bubble wrap.

"You're doing a marvellous job..." she looks at my name badge "...Ben."

"Thank you. You're very kind." And possibly quite mad.

"You don't have spiky hair like him." She gestures to my colleague Tim, a quite exceptionally gay man with whom I hardly flirt at all.

"No madam, he's a wild anarchist. I'm more of a mild-mannered hippy."

"I see. How old are you Ben?"

"I'm thirty-two."

"You must call me mummy."

"Errr..."

Cue shrieks of laughter from Tim.

In an entirely unrelated story, the Pixie and I bimbled over to see my parents last week. We spent a pleasant few days battling giant spiders, smashing furniture with axes and devouring delicious Thai food. The day after our return I inadvertently found a cure to my near crippling Forza/toy soldier painting addiction, by getting some sort of job or something. It's a temporary full-time position, working at the university for some guy that's researching fuel saving aerodynamics. Essentially, it's Pimp My Heavy Goods Vehicle. I start tomorrow, when we'll have a bit of a brainstorm in which we'll try to work out exactly what my job will be.

All of which means that today was pretty much my last chance to get any painting done; and here it is.

Yup, I finally managed to get some actual boyz painted for my super retro old skool rogue trader ork army. The photo is a bit blurry, because a) it's late, and I've had a few glasses of delightfully cheap red wine; and b) this conveniently covers up what a rushed job I've done on them.

false metal = destroyed

And so on Sunday, our Luncheon Club destroyed False Metal; helped in no small part by my knowing the title of Enrique Inglesias' new single.

I'm not proud.

In other minor achievements, I also seem to have passed all of my exams. Nice.

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.

space hoppers full of chip fat

It's been a while. But despite my lengthy(ish) absence from the internets, there is little to report on aside from school, gigs and Pixies.

-----------------------------------------

School

I had to finish and hand in my individual project, an undertaking ever bit as breathtakingly exhilarating as its title "The Evaluation and Optimisation of a Master Side Stay Bracket" might lead you to believe.

Once my pulse had stopped racing from the excitement of all that, it was time to revise for three exams. One of them turned out to be fairly easy, on account of the fact that the questions we had been provided with to practice on were pretty much the questions in the exam. The other two exams were altogether more horrifying affairs, in which we were not provided with answers and were instead seemingly expected to work everything out for ourselves.

They didn't go so well. I'm trying not to think about it.

-----------------------------------------

Gigs

There have been lots of these.

8/5/10 - 65daysofstatic. Euphoric post-rock electronica, splendid as always. But for me, the band of the night were the first support act Nedry, who cranked out a bizarre hybrid of dubstep, jazz guitar and Bjorkisms that was nowhere near as awful as I make it sound. There was a second support act, whose name I forget; but the more I think about it, the more it puts me in mind of this cartoon...

(from www.picturesforsadchildren.com - thanks to The Boy for flinging it my way)

11/5/10 - Mouth of the Architect sound like Neurosis playing Explosions In The Sky covers; but since nobody knows who they are either, that's probably not such a good reference point. For some sense of the sheer beautality these guys serve up, listen to Baobab (fast-forward to around the 8 minute mark if you're impatient/have little tolerance for shouting). Support came from screaming-brutal-sludgecore-types The Mire, who played in complete darkness punctuated by complex sequences of stark white flashing lights. It was all quite atmospheric and impressive, until you realised that the lights were being controlled by a guy frantically plugging and unplugging them all at the side of the stage. We also got Merrick, a local mob of fat shouty men that seemed quite good at the time; though this could be because the band that preceded them (whose name I have chosen to forget, for reasons of tact and drunkenness) were so bloody awful.

14/5/10 - Enablers. I've been desperate to see these guys for years, and they did not disappoint. Doom-laden beat poetry backed by post-rock-esque guitar and drum meanderings, one moment softly introspective, thunderously apocalyptic the next. Need to see them again. I also need to see the second support act The Wailingest Cats again. It was like being violently assaulted in a dark alley by a jazz quintet. The other support acts included a bunch of people that I didn't get there in time to see (though I'm assured that I missed precisely nothing), and an unnervingly tall/skinny/half-naked "performance artist" that was hopefully just taking the piss.

-----------------------------------------

Pixies

Sweet, sweet Pixie.

-----------------------------------------

And in other news; my sister gets married on Saturday.

k-epsilon is the industry standard two-equation turbulence model

There has been drinking and Tapas.

There have been heroically manly exploits in the field of car poking.

There has been an oddly confessional road trip with a manager from the Big Gay Department Store, delivering what later transpires to be completely the wrong thing to a customer.

There has been brightness.

But mostly, there has been a bastarding fuck of a computational fluid dynamics assignment, which up until the hand-in date (today) has utterly consumed me somewhat. Even sleep offered no respite; each morning my alarm would go off and awaken me from a dream in which I was resolving the pressure drop of a continuous fully turbulent flow through a rough walled pipe of known dimensions... and I would hit the snooze button, so I could fall back to sleep and carry on writing the report.

Thankfully, this CFD beast has now been slain - after days of wrestling with incomprehensible theory and even more incomprehensible software, I resolved to just blag the rest of it and hand the fucker in. So I am now free to dedicate myself to working on the other two neglected projects, and preparing for three exams on subjects that make no sense.

school rant

It's a common misconception that the British love to queue up for stuff. And on the face of it, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that would support this hypothesis.

This idea is, of course, bunk.

The act of queuing is merely a means to an end. We like to queue because we like to complain. Queuing in supermarkets is the best. We can look at all the other queues moving quicker than ours and complain about that; we can complain about the person in front of us that has filled their basket exclusively with items that don't scan; we can complain about the fact that they only ever open up a new till after we've been queuing for a million years and it's finally our turn to be served; or we can complain about the old boy at the head of the queue that wants to pay for his shopping with a mixture of coupons, buttons and bits of fluff. We don't like queuing; we like grumbling.

Grumbling is our national pastime.

So please bear with me while I indulge in our national pastime and get my grump on. Here's a blow-by-blow/module-by-module account of how school has been giving me The Rage of late.

• Dynamics, Noise & Vibration.

Dr VC cannot teach. Fact. There's no doubt that he knows his stuff, and I'm sure that in his head it all makes perfect sense, but he is completely incapable of communicating it to anyone else. For most other subjects this isn't a problem; I can just go by the notes instead. But unfortunately Dr VC's notes are just the same deranged stream of consciousness... dig this;

"As indicated above, if the methods of theoretical modal analysis are applied to linear systems, all the methods used for 1-DOF systems can be applied, vis: (complex) algebraic or phasor (Argand) diagrams to obtain the Particular Integral (steady behaviour) for sinusoidal excitation, the foregoing (for sinusoidal) or "common sense" algebraic methods (for non-sinusoidal excitation) plus superposition of complementary function ("transient") and application of initial conditions can be used to obtain the complete the solution; alternatively the Duhamel integral (called the "convolution integral" by many American authors)."

Fuck you, Dr VC.

• Thermofluid Systems.

Okay, so there's three hours of Thermo each week. The first hour and a half is with Dr TM, teaching one topic. The next hour and a half is with RLF, teaching something else entirely. Then the following week, there's an hour and a half of computational fluid dynamics theory with CT, followed by an hour and a half of actual computation fluid dynamics. And then the next week it's back to the start again, and we all have to try and remember whatever it was Dr TM was banging on about a fortnight ago before our heads were filled with a bazillion different kinds of Thermo. WHY, IF YOU WANT TO TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT THERMOFLUID SYSTEMS, WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO DO IT LIKE THIS?!

• Operations and Quality Management.

This module is essentially one big group project.

(from www.toothpastefordinner.com - thanks Charlie Cat)

Group projects suck balls.

• Group Design.

Way back at the start of the year, a bundle of us came back from a year on industrial placements to discover that one of the bastard modules from the second year had been re-named and moved to the third year; which was a problem, since university rules prevent students from earning credits on the same module twice. So the module is cancelled, and the Group Design module is the half-arsed attempt to fill the gap.

And yes, it's another group project.

• Individual Project.

As the title suggests, this is an Individual Project. As such, everything that's going wrong with it is entirely my own doing. This does not make me feel any better at all, as it happens.

• Mechanics of Materials.

Seems to be going okay. I can only assume that some dreadful calamity will occur later in the year.

And yet despite all this, I find myself feeling somewhat slightly chipper of late. There must be something very wrong with me...

mostly being rubbish

I've been staring at this screen for about four hours now, trying to get somewhere with a bit of design work for school. The process goes something like this.

• Draw a line.
• Stare at it for a bit.
• Delete the line.
• Draw the same line again.
• Look at pointless crap on the internets for ten minutes.
• Go back to staring at the line.
• Contemplate how much work could have been completed in the time spent staring at lines and pointless crap.
• Draw a circle.

...and so on. I'm frustrated partly by my inability to get to grips with the design problem, but mainly by the lack of self discipline that has seen me achieve precisely fuck all today.

And yet here I am, pointlessly tapping away. Sigh.

Beastmans Team - ASSEMBLE

Argh school argh.

Still seem to be needlessly repeating a module from year two. Didn't have access to the online project brief that might enable me to make a start on group project work. Still don't have replacement access card to provide access to engineering computer labs with CAD and FEA software for individual project.

There's a Meet The Employers Fair on tomorrow. A large contingent of firms seem to be defence-based. The rest are in IT and communications.

Fuck this shit. Some people have real problems. Here's my Beastmans team for Heat 1 this weekend.


But pictures ain't enough for you hardcore nerds. Here's what's what.

• Doombull - with Mark of Nurgle, heavy armour, shield, and The Black Maul (or, if you're Spanish, El Negro Destroza).
• Wargor - with Mark of Nurgle, Battle Standard, Bloodhunt Horn and heavy armour.
• Bray-Shaman - with Mark of Nurgle, Chaos Armour, Dispel Scroll and braystaff.
• Beastherd - 8 Gor & 10 Ungor, with full command.
• Beastherd - 8 Gor & 10 Ungor, with full command.
• 3 Minotaurs - with Mark of Nurgle, light armour, great weapons and standard bearer with the War Banner.
• 3 Minotaurs - with Mark of Nurgle, light armour and great weapons.
• 3 Minotaurs - with Mark of Nurgle, light armour and great weapons.
• 2 Tuskgor Chariots.
• 7 Warhounds of Chaos.
• 5 Warhounds of Chaos.
• 4 Dragon Ogres - with light armour and great weapons.

The Doombull runs around with the War Banner wielding Minotaurs, stabbing everyone's face off with his Black Maul.

I know it's a maul. He's gonna stab people with it anyway.

The Wargor and Bray-Shaman get unit of Beastmans each to boss around, the Warhounds are there to die gloriously, and everything else is just well hench.

In theory, it should be a good army. In practice, it'll be me using it; so I'm aiming for just a single win out of the six games, and hoping that I qualify for the finals on that sweet, sweet Best Army nomination meal ticket.

it's a damn good thing i can't just kill people with a single thought

Back at school now. My barely repressed urge to hit customers with blunt objects has dissipated, and been replaced with the urge to hit all kinds of other people with blunt objects.

Day one was, predictably, a massive waste of time. The first hours "cohort meeting" - in which the students and the programme leader get to, like, chat about stuff - was effectively cancelled when we all turned up to the designated room and found a bunch of other people in there, and so waited in the room next door; and then the programme leader turned up to the designated room and found a bunch of other people in there, and so buggered off. The next thing on the timetable was a two hour tutorial session to follow up a Control Systems Engineering lecture that hadn't happened yet; so instead we got a basic run down of what the module was all about. Turns out that it's exactly the same as the Industrial Control module that we did in our second year, it's just been re-named and moved to the third year. So either we'll all re-do the module, or they'll "find something else for us to do."

I honestly don't begrudge paying tuition fees.

UNTIL SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS.

Day two more lived up to my expectations, insofar as I spent ten hours discovering just how little information my brain has retained from the first two years of study.

And the whole place is just crawling with people. I can't wait until the same time next month, when two thirds of those cool bastards will have decided that it's all too difficult or boring or pointless and drop out. Maybe then I'll be able to get to a computer in the library, and move through corridors without rubbing against strangers.

All of which has nothing to do with diseased killer goat-men.


These are the last of my Beastmans; a unit of 16 Pestigor. They're like normal Beastmen, except that instead of the special rules that make normal Beastmen cool, they get a load of special rules, stat increases and equipment that make them a massive waste of points.


Consequently, no matter how pretty they may be, I don't seem able to find a place for them in the 'orrible Beastman Army o' Death that I'll be taking to Heat 1 of the Grand Tournament in ten days time...

But more about that later.

Fetid dingo’s kidneys

And so time creeps slowly by.

My day-to-day existence is captured almost perfectly in this picture.

By day, I paint toy soldiers; and by night, I drink until I slip into blissful unconsciousness on the sofa. There are many reasons for this; but mainly, I just don’t have anything better to do on the five days each week that I’m not working in the Big Gay Department Store. It also serves as a useful aid to procrastination… there’s still a lot of unpacking and organising to be done (even though we’ve been moved in for over a month now), and frankly the whole place could use a damn good clean up; but I just can’t see why I should bother. My two fattest and hairiest housemates are either unfussed about the general state of the place, or else completely oblivious to it. At least if Charlie Cat was here there’d be a chance of keeping it all tidy, and the offer of some help… but she’s still away having fun, somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire, bossing kids about and making them cry. I’m unwilling to stand alone against the tide of filth that follows in the wake of the other two (I’m pretty sure it would just be an exercise in futility anyway), and so I am having to grow accustomed to the ever increasing levels of squalor that surround me.

This is where the drinking comes in.

On the plus side, I got the preliminary results from my exams at the beginning of the week, and they were pretty good. Even the heinous Stress Analysis Exam Of DoomTM, which I thought that I might have to re-sit, yielded a relatively healthy 67%; and that was the worst of the results.

I also seem to have scored myself a placement, working for a company that makes turbine blades. It’s based some 75 miles away in Exeter, which is a bit of a pain; but it’s kind of relieving to know exactly what I will be doing next year.

So apart from wanting to murder most of my housemates, things aren’t going too badly for now.

Oh yeah, the blog thing...

May sucked balls. Really big ones. I had all my exams, interspersed with placement application/interview/rejection, car insurance company wrangling, and being slightly evicted from the pub.

I’ll begin by moaning about my car shenanigans. Shortly after posting my last rant on this topic, I decided to phone my insurance company to see if they could explain to me why a breakers yard in the west midlands had posted my tax disc to me. They had to go away and think about it for a while, but eventually they phoned me back and told me that my car was in fact a “total loss”, and that one of their engineers would be in touch soon to discuss the value of my car. Quite how they decided that repair would be uneconomical without a) knowing the value of my car and b) even looking at it (I learned from the breakers that it went straight to them from the recovery garage without going anywhere near the mythical “approved garage” of which my insurers spoke) remains something of a mystery to me.

Equally mysterious is why they chose to use the phrase “discuss the value of your car”. Because when the engineer phoned me, he told me that he had established the market value of my car by looking online at used Rover 216 GTI’s, finding the cheapest one possible, and deciding that that was probably what mine was worth; no discussion or negotiation would be entered into.

Needless to say, the market value of my car turned out to be less than what I had paid to insure it in the first place. My glasses which were in the car weren’t covered by the insurance policy, and after buying a new pair and paying the excess on my policy I had a whole £50 to play with. Except I didn’t, because my premiums apparently increased when I moved house and/or bought a new car, meaning I am now £100 down - not including the cost of the insurance in the first place, or the cost of the new car.

Of course, when I say I have a new car, I mean that it is new to me. I am now the owner of a very used 1995 Mk3 Volkswagon Golf. It is red. When it was new, it would have looked like this.

Mine looks more like this.

I’m not a fan; but it should be good to get me around and about whilst I look for a proper car.

Meanwhile, exams happened. Some were okay, some were a bit disastrous. Things might have gone a bit better if I’d not taken time out from revision to attend various interviews for placements which were never offered to me anyway. There was also the added distraction of finding out, two hours before my second-to-last exam, that we had five days to find somewhere else to live.

If Dozer knows exactly what happened, he’s not telling anyone. I suspect that I’m happier not knowing. Essentially, the brewery told him that they’d found someone else to run the pub, and under the terms of his contract they only had to give him one week’s notice.

Somehow, Dozer and Charlie (who had officially moved into the pub with us just two weeks previously) managed to find somewhere that we could move into almost immediately, and that wasn’t completely rubbish. In fact, it’s quite nice here… Of course, not living in the pub means that I will have to get used to a few things; like peace and quiet, having hot water whenever I want it, and turning up to work sober on Saturday mornings.

Anyway, with all the relocating and change of personnel, it’s probably a good time for a quick roll call.

Dozer: It probably tells you all that you need to know about Dozer to know that he got the cable TV set up in the new house before he got his bed set up. In fact, it was almost a full week before he was able to physically set foot in his room, as it was so full of his crap. In unrelated news, he was recently asked by his (now ex-) girlfriend, “Hypothetically, what would you do if I was pregnant?” he responded with “Hypothetically, how do you feel about being pushed down the stairs?”

Sam: Sam is the only person I know who gets out of breath eating toast. He is also the only person I know who watches M.A.S.H. and actually finds it funny. Last weekend he got up late and went to the shops just before they closed; in his rush to make his purchases, he completely forgot what it was that we actually needed (bread, milk, the usual stuff) and so came home with tonic water and fresh limes. I still cannot decide if this is to his credit or not.

Charlie Cat: Only technically lives here, since she disappeared a few days after we all moved in to go and spend her summer working for some outdoor activities company, making kids cry. She seems to be enjoying herself. In her absence, there is something of a sexiness deficit in the household, which us grunting Neanderthals are entirely failing to make up for.

That’s enough for now, I think. With all the horror of exams and house-moving behind me, hopefully I shall get back to posting with sort of regularity…

But I wouldn’t count on it.