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OK, so I took 2 herbal sleeping pills at 7, two more at 8, tossed and turned until about 10, work up at 1:30, got up at 2:30 and had two more, back to bed, tossed and turned until 4:50, then finally fell asleep. I should have been up at 5. I decided to go with the sleep and set the alarms for 2 hours later. These things are about as effective as a hot cup of cocoa. There is a reason why you can’t overdose on them: they don’t do anything. They only possible side effect of taking to many is listed as ‘user may become over sedated’. Er… no. User finally fell asleep due to sheer bloody exhaustion. I was in a rush when I bought them and you didn’t need to take them to the counter to get the display box replaced with a real box (and answer the inevitable barrage of questions cunningly designed to waste a few minutes), I think I’ll get some proper ones with honest to god man made chemicals in them that have nasty side effects and, most importantly, send you to sleep when you actually take them. I wont be in so much of a rush today so I can answer the silly questions:

Why are you taking these?

Oh, I’m just going round all the chemists in the area buying them up, I intend to take 200 of them with a bottle of whiskey tonight… I can’t sleep you numpty, why else would I be buying them?

Are you on any other medication?

Yup, whacked out on about 200 of the herbal ones as they didn’t actually work. Thinking about it, perhaps I should have drunk that bottle of whiskey as well, it might have actually got me to sleep!

Are you allergic to anything?

Yes, stupid questions, now give me the damn pills.

Yes, I’m tired and crosspatch today.

Insomnia sucks. It would seem I’m not alone in this. Of course, your normal, well balaced [sic] person would have just taken some more cold tablets and gone back to sleep. Not me. Oh no. That’s way too easy. Nope, I get up, get a drink [normal so far], throw back a bucket load of pills (cold pills, vitamin pills, herbal sleeping pills) [still fairly normal, although the herbal sleeping pills suck, all I can say is thank god you can't overdose on them because I've chucked 6 of those buggers down my throat tonight alone], bought a £200 limited edition sword and then blogged about it [yup, there's the insanity]. Let’s just hope I don’t get stopped by the police on Tuesday (which is when my purchase should be delivered to work) because I’ll also be having this delivered too. I’m off to try and eek out another couple of hours sleep from tonight. All I can say is thank god I went to bed at 8.

So I got to spend today confusing Blue about cameras and I think it’s probably best if I share the most important thing she learned with everyone:

When taking your camera out charge the battery first

Personally I just think she wanted to play with my fancy pants camera (“Your camera isn’t that much bigger than mi…. oh”). Pictures later when I’ve downloaded them from the camera [maybe - depends what came out].

Anyway, let it officially be announced that today we made The Bet. The terms and conditions of The Bet are not going to be made public here (unless Blue doesn’t mind me doing so). Hopefully I’ll loose, but in case I win I want a written record so she can’t back out.

Hopefully next time we’ll get some more bloggers out too

OK, so some of you have been asking where I have been for the past [insert time period here]. So I dropped of the face of the planet a little but that was really only on Tuesday and it’s only a few days later. I’ve been on holiday, at home with a shockingly intermittent interwebnet connection, way too much House, Scrubs, Heroes, Lost and Numbers to watch, 9 shirts to iron, 7 loads of washing to do (I did all my towels and bedding too) and an interesting nutritional study to perform. The question on the table was:

Is it possible to live on eggy bread and peanut butter sarnies for a week?*

The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. I now have a cold. Still can’t be arsed to go to the supermarket to get some proper food though

Am also still undecided as to whether I should continue my social experiment** and go out tonight or if I should stay in and watch more TV, slob about and upgrade the cold to manflu*** and get an early night.

* The results of the experiment may also be invalid as I had 2 kebabs during the week too.

** is it possible to pull a stunningly attractive girl without actually talking to them because you’re too scared to go anywhere near them?

*** Manflu would be a good precursor, and subsequent nice cause for, my impending death

It would appear from my users list that Keefy has been reading this blog. This may not mean much to most of you (apart from Des) but Keef (as we’ll call him, since that’s the username he’s picked and, to be fair, it’s what I call him most of the time) isn’t really so hot on all this Web 2.0 malarkey (although you could argue blogging is web 1.5) so it’s quite a surprise to see him here. Hello Keify and when are you dragging the misses down to the big smoke to come out and play again?

Oh my god people, it’s not even November yet and I’m seeing blog entries with people telling me how many weeks to Christmas. Not only that but I’ve seen pubs with Christmas decorations up (to be fair, I saw those last last month some time, 3 months before the bloody event). It’s getting silly. It’s supposed to be the celebration of the birth of the [supposedly] immaculately conceived [although lets face it, that's only because the Catholic church is terrified of the whole idea of sex and they did rather loose it when they proclaimed no procreation without sex (over and above no sex without procreation) to cover test tube babies and completely forgetting that that was one of the big points of their religion] prophet/messiah [depending on your religion of choice, assuming, of course, that yours is one of the major religions that actually chronicles Jesus] who goes on to get nailed to a tree for suggesting we all just be nice to each other [yes, yes, I stole that from Mr Adams, so sue me], not some consumerist love fest spread over a quarter of the year. For starters we celebrate it on the wrong day and pretty much everything we do do to celebrate it is pagan/hallmark in origin. So why the big fuss? Lets face it, Christmas day is never the day of good cheer and happiness we’re all lead to believe it is. There is so much bloody pressure and stress on everyone to have a good time that that is the last thing that’s going to happen. Basically it’s greed. We all get overly excited about getting nice gifts and the shops get overly excited about ripping us off selling us nice gifts and the sooner they can start doing that the happier they are. I intend to buck the trend this year and will be doing the following:

1) Christmas, and it’s impending arrival will not be acknowledged until the 1st of December. I will acknowledge this by dint of purchasing an advent calendar. Said advent calendar will not be used as a means of reminding me how soon Christmas is, but instead (as has been the case every other year) will be used as a convenient vehicle to deliver a daily dose of chocolate to me in the mornings without people complaining.

2) I will not be sending cards. To anyone. A greeting will be issued on this blog nearer the time to everyone who wishes to accept it.

3) Gifts will be limited in scope and cost. I expect the same in return. I’ve got nowhere else to store stuff. I’ve told most of my family what I want anyway. If you really want to spoil me I have The List. The cheapest items on said list are over £100. Most of them are over £2000. Do not ask to see The List if items with a £5999 list price will upset you. If you ask to see The List I expect and item off it (Bathgirl, you’re exempt, you asked for the list prior to this rule, plus you’re probably daft enough to go buy something off it anyway ). Otherwise stick with nothing/what I’ve told you I want, that way it’ll be more like £20 or less.

4) I will be spending Christmas at home, in Colchester, with no overnight guests. No, I’m not being a miserable sod, I just don’t want the hassle of your usual Christmas day. I want to get up when I want, watch crap films in high definition, play far to many computer games, eat what I want to eat and generally just slob. No doubt my mates who live locally will pop by for a visit. This will be acceptable (although barely as it does mean I’ve actually got to get dressed). I’ve also been invited out for Christmas dinner. This is also acceptable.

4a) Item 4 is rescinded if I find a cute girlfriend on or before the 25th of December. If this is the case then I still want to spend Christmas at Colchester, but this time alone with her with NO interruptions at all. It also means I wont have to get dressed. I put the likelyhood of this happening at slightly lower than my chances of winning the lottery jackpot.

5) I’ll probably not be visiting people in the days off between Christmas and New Year unless they are in the local area. Again, I’m not being miserable, the trains are completely up the spout and I actually need to work on the non weekend/public holiday parts of those weeks. Since the majority of my relatives don’t actually have broadband (or sky HD… or any of the other essential comforts) I’ll need to be at home to dial in (yup, the trains are so far up the spout I won’t even be able to make it into the office).

6) Please note my animosity towards Christmas and all it stands for does not extend to Easter which I celebrate in the fashion in which it was originally intended (i.e. the unadulterated worship of crap chocolate and the consumption of vast amounts of hot cross buns). Get saving now because if I’m not puking due to chocolate poisoning on Easter day theirs going to be trouble.

</rant>

OK, I’m not one for sport. I can’t stand football and find the way the players fall over if anyone comes anywhere near them hysterically funny. Hell, I’d run around for 90 minutes falling over if someone was going to pay me that much money. rugby, on the other hand, I don’t mind (the one sport I ever took an interest in was American football and it’s close enough to rugby for me not to mind watching it) and since the majority of my new found Colchester friends love rugby I’ve decided to take a bit more of an interest (besides, I don’t care how much money you pay me, I wouldn’t run round for 80 minutes being knocked over by some of the brutes they’ve got playing).

So, it’s the rugby world cup final this Saturday. I’ve got enough of a grasp of the rules to work out who is who, what they’re trying to do and who is winning all I need to do now is work out who to support. My friends are South Africans and Australians so they will, of course, all be supporting the South Africans (stands to reason really). They won’t mind if I support the English (I was, after all born here and 50% of my biological parentage [just don't ask - it gets way too complicated] comes from here) but… well… I don’t actually want them to win.

Now, before you denegrate me and cast me into some hitherto unnamed level of hell hear me out. In 1966 we won the football world cup. 1966. Last millennium. And we [the English] still. Wont. Shut. Up. About it. I mean, for God’s sake, it was 41 years ago. Most of the people who go on about it weren’t even born then.

Lets look at the rugby. We won last time. Woo, go us and all that. A tad annoying that millions of people who were never rugby fans before suddenly became ardent, lifelong fans of the game, but hey, we’ll ignore that. There were parades through the streets, a heroes welcome and much punditry about the whole affair for bloody ages. If we win again we will be the first country ever to win the rugby world cup twice in a row.  Can you imagine how that’s going to go down? We, as a country, will become unbearable. We’ll be rubbing it in everyones faces and we’ll be milking it for eons. Centuries from now, no matter how badly we’re beaten, we’ll be clinging onto the ‘yeah, but in 2007 we won the cup twice in a row’.

Actually, sod it, I’m going to claim my heritage on my fathers side. Come on you Bajan Blues!

OK, so it’s my own fault since I did set out to drastically improve my social life, but recently I haven’t so much been burning the candle at both ends as dousing it in petrol and setting fire to it with a flame thrower. I’ve already marked next weekend as a ‘quiet weekend’ in my diary because every free weekend I’ve had has ended up with me doing something fun (yes, poor me, forced to go out and have fun all the time - my blog, can whinge about whatever I like - now shush) but I think that’s still a little bit too far away. In order to try and catch up on things like sleep and… actually, just sleep, I’m going to spend Sunday dead. This could leave to some interesting conversations:

“You coming to the pub Sunday afternoon?”
“No, sorry, I’ll be dead.”

But it does have a certain finality about it that’s hard to argue with. Tired, ill, wanting to mooch around can all be argued against (”Oh, go on, just come out for one”), death stops any kind of silly persuasion going on.

For those wishing to morn my passing I’ll be dead from…oooh…lets say 3am Sunday morning (allows me to go out Saturday night) until 5am Monday morning (when I’ll be brutally raised from the dead by my alarm). I’ll then be mostly dead until about 10/11am, but that’s normal; it takes me that long just to come to terms with the week.

…I failed miserably. That said, I didn’t try particularly hard, plus it would appear the entire cute rock chick population of Rock City already has boyfriends. Boo, hiss! I think it was a different DJ this week so it wasn’t quite as good as last time but fun was still had and, on the plus side, I didn’t injure myself quite as badly as I did last time.

Highlight of the night has to be watching NTU Rock Soc holding day whatever-it-was of their alternative freshers week and standing on the dance floor looking like they were at the school disco. Was most amusing to see them all having to get out their ID to get in. Unsurprisingly I  didn’t get asked, but then I was going to Metallica concerts when this lot were 4!

I’m tired. I’m not sleeping well and I’ve just about had enough (and no, I’m not going to explain or elaborate) so I’m going to stick two fingers up at it, sod off to Nottingham with Bathgirl and terrorise the local female population in Rock City. Furthermore there will be a Circle of Respect (as Bathgirl calls it) on the dance floor as I fully intend to mosh away to a large amount of very heavy, very loud, very aggressive music in lieu of getting absolutely smashed out of my tiny. I have, therefore, some personal messages for people. If they apply to you please take note:

To the cute rock chicks in the Nottingham area: If the answer is ‘no‘ then you’ve probably not had enough to drink. I will happily supply you with enough alcohol to change this to a ‘yes‘. You simply need to ask.

To everyone on the dance floor (both in the main club and The Rig): Get out of my way. I’m going to need at least a 4′ diameter space to avoid knocking into you, whipping you with my hair or cracking skulls with you, etc.

To the DJs: You will play the following tracks. Nine Inch Nails, Sin; Nine Inch Nails, Closer; Ministry, Burning Inside; Machine Head, From This Day. If, for whatever reason, I fail to suitably terrorise the local females you may then play any and all Fear Factory, Threat Signal and Circle of Dust, Brainchild (if its the Brainchild, Mindwarp album stick to Telltale Crime and Prayers of A Deadman, but then I’ll be seriously impressed if you have either of those albums). Please ensure an ambulance with back board and neck brace is waiting by the door if you do.

To the gaggle of students tittering by the side of the dance floor: If you think I look silly you really want to take a look at how ridiculous your boyfriends look trying to headbang without hair. I know I look good and I really don’t give a crap.

To the inevitable numpty who’s been dragged there by his friends and doesn’t fit in: Taking the piss on the dance floor isn’t funny and one of these days someone is going to hit you. Go join the giggling students and take the piss quietly.

It’s going to be big, it’s going to be loud and I am going to be in serious amounts of pain tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be in a better mood by then.

Right, I need to get ready, go buy a new top and get some form of public transport to Nottingham. Have a good one.

P.S. You’re all more than welcome to come. You can stand at the side and point and laugh. I’ll even buy you a drink or two.