Any yes, many posts have come at one (again), but I there was a new Terry Pratchett book out and I was reading that on the train instead of penning witty prose for the amusement and edification of you lot. Sorry

I formally declare the summer to be over. There is a distinct chill in the air and I am wearing a jumper for the first time since… well… last winter

If you told me a year ago that I would be willingly going to visit a baby, on my own, without being dragged, kicking and screaming by someone else I would have probably laughed at you, but that’s what I did yesterday. Im my defence I practically lived with Sprog for 6 months and during that time had to help out with some of the easier tasks (mainly the feeding - mercifully very little direct help was needed on the nappy front) which meant we inadvertently ended up bonding. She is also rather cute. Anyhoos, blessed, as I am, with the rather rosy picture of having a baby in the house (i.e. only having to pitch in if I wanted to, having somewhere to escape to if it all got Too Much and not having to get involved in the messy bits and, most importantly, not having to get up in the middle of the night all the time) I am prepared to give Sprog special dispensation and classify her as human some 17 years early.

Been a while since I last saw Sprog but in that time her teeth have come through properly, she can now walk (I guess it’s still toddling, she falls and trips over rather a lot) and she can say the odd word. Not bad for someone who couldn’t do anything but cry loudly 12 months ago.

Some might say that the previous failed excursion to rock city was down to poor planning. Not I. I would say it was down the the lack of a rubber duck. Thankfully Bathgirl (don’t ask) was able to locate a rubber duck in the car park at the beginning of our second sojourn to Nottingham to go to rock city. Armed with the duck we found much rock. More rock than we could handle which is my Matt and I are barely able to move today. Ah, but we looked good on the dance floor and our rather energetic approach to NiN and the like earned us a nice space on the floor and some grudging respect from the normals who were there (either that, or they were mocking us, it’s so hard to tell).

Anyway, that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because of the girl who was dancing on the stage in The Rig. She was of slightly below average figure. With a slightly thinner waist, fuller chest and more toned legs she may well have made the leather dress and FMB’s she was wearing look good, but alas it just looked…well…average. She was also insistent in trying to dance like a lap and/or pole dancer. Which would have been great if she’d been any good at it. Instead she just looked ridiculous… but it was impossible to look away. There were suggestive moves with bottles, lots of writhing on the floor, lots of swinging about on the railings all of which looked almost exactly like a drunk girl trying to be sexy. Problem was: I don’t think she was that drunk! Next time I go (assuming she’s there again) I’ll try and video some of it so you can see it in all its horrifying glory. This time all you get is a picture of the rubber ducky, my pint of lemonade, Babs’ Stella and Bathgirls bottle of dog.

Right, enough fart arsing about, more posting of sweet pictures (cos yes, I know you’ve all been unable to continue with your lives since finding out there would be pictures and then having to wait for them). Well, the wait is over. Behold: bonbons

Behold, box of sweets (which might actually look more impressive than it does if I’d included something to give you a sense of scale and actually got the fact that its 3 layers deep.. look, just go ‘wow’ and humor me here ):

Behold: 58 lolipops (2 have been eaten, only 1 by me):

Next week: photos of my new fillings

So I’m thinking of changing my online dating profile to a simple picture with 1 line of text:

I can has date?

And, yes, I am brutally aware that that is not grammatically correct, but that seems to be the point of lolcats (e.g. I can has cheezburger?). If you still don’t get it wikipedia can explain.

Going to the gym in a bad mood is a bad idea. You don’t so much use the machines as attack them. Your choice of music (or at least my choice of music) turns to the loud and aggressive which will invariable have a very fast tempo, which leads to an extreme workout. Most embarrassing, however, if the fact that this kind of workout seriously elevates your heart rate and if you ignore the little red flashing warning light on the bike you end up with one of the gym staff explaining to you how a heart rate of 220 is not something I want to sustain for too long a period of time and perhaps I might want to ease the cycling back from 180rpm to between 80 and 120.

Still, I managed to get 0.75km done on the crosstrainer, and 7.5km done on the bike. No swimming as I’d run out of drink by that point and was also wanting to leave a little bit of energy for the walk home. I might see if I can do 1km on the crosstrainer and 10km on the bike tomorrow as the pool is causing my eyes to get very sore and the goggles I’ve ordered don’t arrive until next week. If I take it at a slightly more sedate pace I might be able to do it. We’ll see how it goes.

My desk had numerous visitors yesterday. It would seem that having a hayuge pot of lemon bonbons on your desks makes you a very popular person indeed. The majority of the sweets have been taken home now and put into plastic containers with just the bonbons and most of the aniseed balls being left at work full time. I shall spend the next few weeks taking in a little goodie bag of sweets for the day in a vain attempt to ration myself to non diabetes causing levels of sugar Today’s ration is 6 lemon sours, 10 cola cubes, 10 fizzy cola bottles… and probably a stack load of lemon bonbons and aniseed balls

Oh, and if you though the amount of stuff I bought was insane, one of my colleagues was talking about spending a 3 figure sum on that website!

anyway, for those who know were I sit, help yourself to bonbons*. For everyone else, if you give me an excuse to come out and play I may be persuaded to bring a little goodie bag for you**

Pictures will be forthcoming.

* While stocks last. Maximum 2 bonbons per person per visit. Terms and conditions apply. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up payments on your mortgage or other loans secured on it. Your statutory rights are not affected.

** While stocks last. Offer is limited to the Greater London area and is on a first come, first serve basis***. The judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered in to. No purchase necessary. The value of your investments may fall as well as rise.

*** Attractive, single women will be allowed to queue jump. The presence of strings can be negotiated.

OK, dull and boring post, but this has been annoying me, plus you might learn something about Interest Rates (not much though and it’s all very UK centric).

So, you want a mortgage? Fine, you go to a mortgage lender and they will present you with a number of products, most of which deal with the Bank Of England Base rate. Lets keep this simple and say we get a floating mortgage at 1% over the base rate. So if the Bank Of England say interest rates are 5.75% then our mortgage will be at 6.75%. Easy.

Let us now assume that the company we are getting the mortgage from (lets call them, picking a name at random, Southern Stone) doesn’t actually have the money we are borrowing. Instead they go off and borrow it from another bank. This other bank will charge us interest in this loan at LIBOR (the interbank interest rate in London) which is, usually, going to be less than what we’re charging out customers. If we assume LIBOR is 0.5% above the base rate then we’ll be borrowing money at 6.25%, lending it at 6.75% and making a tidy 0.5% off the life of the loan. Good stuff.

Now let us assume that people have been lending the US equivalent of chavs lots of money at punitive interest rates. Let us further assume that this, frankly quite silly practice, blows up in everyone’s face and causes a little bit of a fracas. We can ignore the majority of what it’s caused and focus on one of the more interesting side effects for us: LIBOR rates get silly. Very silly. Then the banks just stop lending to each other.

Crud, now Southern Stone have no way to get money to lend new money. Hey ho, let’s just go to the Bank Of England and ask them nicely. All we’re doing here is we’re going from commercial banks to the central bank to borrow our money.

Now lets add the media, add a touch of hype, a smattering of frenzy and I can bet you that Southern Stone wont exist in a years time. The few savings accounts they did have were safe. The mortgages they already look after are safe. All that is a problem is raising new money to sell new mortgages to keep the business growing.  If there were any other problems the FSA would have stepped in and the Bank Of England probably wouldn’t be willing to extend the emergency loan facility in the first place (which they haven’t used yet).

So there’s a run on the bank, now the reserves of money are looking tight (thank you The Media), the banks reputation takes a hit (thank you The Media), share price tanks (gotta love equities traders ). Eventually the share price will get low enough that one of the big boys will snap them up strip out the meaty goodness in the form of the existing mortgages and leave the rotting carcass of the company in the bin, but in the mean time it’s all eyes on the poor little company that was just the victim of a blip in the markets and the resulting media histrionics (oh, and a crap capitalisation plan ).

OK, so I’ve grossly oversimplified, but you get the idea. The current run on Northern Rock is purely The Media going “oooh, they’ve got an emergency loan… don’t panic “. If they’d said nothing the great unwashed wouldn’t be queuing to get their money out. Gotta love The Media sometimes.

Today was always going to be a bad day. I won’t explain why, but I knew up front that it was going to be crappy. To counter this last Friday I bought myself a vast quantity of sweets, and I mean vast.

The phrase “Like a kid in a sweet shop” has never really made sense to me. Yes, they’re going to look around and, hungry look on their little faces, claim that they want everything, but the harsh reality of limited pocket money and competing demands for same means a child’s finances are never really going to stretch to anything but the smallest splurge.

Consider, instead, the same scenario with an adult in a sweet shop. Given this is a male adult the mental age will match that of the child and the reaction will be the same. The difference is very important though. The adult will purchase the sweets online with the use of a credit card. There is no human interaction to caution restraint, no incredulous looks from anyone to embarrass us into stopping and, most importantly, no arbitrary limits on how much we can spend (ok, so there is a theoretical limit of £3500 in this case but even I’d be very hard pushed to spend that on boiled sweets, lollies, sherbet and penny chews).

So, like a deranged, sugar crazed, overpaid adult in a sweetshop I purchased the following:

• 250g x Acid Drops (Mouth Puckering!)
• 500g x Aniseed Balls
• 500g x Pascalls Kola Kubes
• 500g x Sherbet Lemons
• 250g x Cola Crystals
• 250g x Lemon Crystals
• 250g x Lime Crystals
• 250g x Orange Crystals
• 500g x Fizzy Cola Bottles
• 60 x Fruity Pops
• 1 x Original Sharps Lemon Bonbons Jar (2.75Kg of Bonbons!)

Yes, that’s 0.75Kg of sherbert (which shall be eaten with the aid of the 60 lollipops)and over 5Kg of boiled sweets. So perhaps the jar of Bonbons was a little OTT but what the hey.

So how much for this little suger fest? You’d probably balk if I told you I’d spend £8.64 on sweets stating that’s way too much to by spending on glorious refined sugar. I’d disagree since that is the amount I paid in VAT. That little lot set me back £54.04 (plus £3.95 for delivery). It may seem a lot, but that sugary goodness will keep me happy for a long time [ok, a month at most] and would have helped today go slightly better… except it never arrived. I also have no idea where it is as the tracking like I was given for my treats didn’t work. It could be that our post room has the parcel and are just being crap at sending it up, or it could be that my diabetes inducing snacks have been lost in transit. Either way I was bereft of Nice Things at work and can only hope they turn up tomorrow. In the mean time I am heading home to crack open the stick of rock I had the foresight to buy when I was visiting the coast yesterday and have consoled myself by purchasing season 5 of scrubs on DVD (amazon’s one click ordering is a dangerous thing).

Hopefully the sweeties will be there, on my desk, when I get in tomorrow otherwise there will be trouble. And no, you can’t have any, get your own