Lurking

Just a quick word before I zoom off to bed, having not had that much sleep since Friday. I was quite amused to read that Mr. B. Liar, who used to be prime minister until he was sacked, is buying his 8th or 9th addition to a world property empire.

I had quite a lot of fun wandering around while The Mansion was being redecorated, spying on everyone to make sure they were doing it properly and not bunging the factor a few quid to get away with bodge jobs. I can just see Mrs. Liar doing that to get max. value for the ill-gotten gains.

I pretended to be an IT guy, wandering round with a meter, allegedly measuring radio signal strengths and looking for things that would block a signal. If you look like you’re doing something, you become fairly invisible. Not something Mrs. Liar could manage without some serious disguising!

Luckily, I never came across anyone doing something totally outrageous. Because I’d have had a bit of a problem explaining how I knew something dodgy had gone one. And the only way to get around that might have been to have those ripping me off "taken care of". I hear there are ways for seriously rich people to get that done. I suppose there’s a website for it. There seems to be one for most things.

Close, But No Cigar For Me

I’ve watched it on TV but I never thought anyone does weather-chasing in this country. But my Gadgets Guy, Steve, put me in touch with Jake to win a bet. Jake has actually got a minivan loaded with radar gear, and he cruises around Britain in his spare time, looking for extreme weather pictures for newspapers, TV and various agencies. During the summer, he also tries to be near anywhere that looks like dropping a tornado.

He got lucky last weekend; he got some fairly profitable pictures of the twister that formed over Stanford-le-Hope in Essex last Saturday, but it didn’t touch down and it did him out of Pictures of Destruction. But he had a real pay-day the following Monday. Lots of wreckage in Great Livermere in Suffolk and he got some excellent live action video of the demolition job.

I’ve been riding around with him for the last few days. No tornadoes but we did see two pretty good waterspouts playing tag on the Channel for about five or ten minutes. Jake was pleased with the video he shot but I'm still hoping to see a decent tornado the next time things look promising.

That’s Life For You

Is lordship has commanded me to write something today because he’s still off enjoying himself. No, he’s not at a meeting of LWA – Lottery Winners Anonymous for people who’ve won $20 million or more [Life, Season 2, ITV 3, last night] Only in America, eh!
   Is Lordship didn’t tell me what to say, so I guess I’ll just have to busk.
   My uncle has been having a spot of bovver with the goverment, he told me the last time he dropped in (to see if we had too much whisky). He’s recently retired after working for himself for donkey’s years and he used to pay his National Insurance by direct debit. A couple of months after the DWP stopped taking cash off a guy who was 65, he cancelled the direct debit.
   Next thing he knew, the DW bloody P was threatening to send him bills for National Insurance if he didn’t start up the direct debit again. So now, he’s waiting to see if they’ll send him a bill for £0.00 so he can blow up their computer by sending them a cheque for £0.0.
   No wonder the country’s broke if the people running it are so bloody useless.
   I bet that’s more inneresting than anything is lordship’s come up with and I bet he doesn’t read this.

Irwin

Got One Too!

That stuff in the papers about Blair’s missus getting him the sack really pinged my radar. According to the legend, the Wicked Witch of the West got right up the noses of the Labour party by getting the Drowning Street nuclear bunker done up, at great expense to the nation, because she didn’t like the colour. And that threw them all into such a hissy fit that they ganged up on Blair and forced him to tell them when he’d push off.

I’ve got one too - a bunker not a WWotW. Not that it started off as a fallout shelter. According to the archives in my library (a load of stuff abandoned by previous owners), the bunker started off as a root cellar, which was turned into a cess pit. When they got some more modern plumbing installed, it became redundant.

Sometime in the 1930s, the then owner of The Mansion had all the cess cleared out. Later on, he had a roadway built down to an underground car park. This was about the time of the Spanish Civil War and he thought war with Germany was inevitable and he didn’t want the Jerries dropping bombs on his collection of cars.

Come the 1950s, the garage became a fallout shelter. Then, in the late 1990s, it became part of an energy conservation scheme, which can’t have done the last owner much good because he went bankrupt when his Global Warming Scam collapsed about his ears in the Brown recession.

I haven’t really done anything with the bunker yet. I’ve had a look at it, but there’s more than enough space in The Mansion for me, and it’s a bit of a hike to the bunker. Still, it’s always there if the peasants get revolting and I need somewhere to hide out. I wonder what colour the WWotW had hers painted? Mine’s a warmish shade of pastel orange.

Home Base

I found myself experiencing a certain paralysis when the money was in the bank, cleared and available to spend. I didn’t get close to the top end of the miserable pittance the financial advisor reckoned I should trust myself with until I’d become used to having enough cash to splurge and walk away from disasters.

I bought a 26" TV and some DVDs, and that was about it for the first week. Apart from a case of Ballantine’s whisky, which I’ve not seen in the shops for ages, but which I must have been able to buy once because I still have some of the bottles around, loaded down with bits of lead foil from wine bottles (something you don’t get now) and used as book-ends.

The mansion was something the FA didn’t choke on, to my surprise. He even thought it would be a good investment. 8 bedrooms, not counting the staff quarters and 14 main rooms. I guess I just wanted to be able to walk ten yards indoors without tripping over furniture or banging into a wall. It’s not quite up to the Nickelback song “Rockstar” - a bathroom I can play baseball in, and so on - but it’s a good step up from a suburban semi.

Ground Zero

Okay, some of the craziness has worn off and my Reality Management Counsellor reckons this will help to get some things straight in my head and keep me within a hoot & a holler, if not spitting distance, of reality.

Doing a blog, he reckons, is a bit like going to an AA meeting. Not that I've ever been to one, but I watch plenty of rubbish on the TV and some characters are never out of them! Inmates of everything from alleged comedies to cop shows. So you'd expect the TV mob to get the look and feel of them approximately right.

Hi, my name is Xavier and I'm awesomely rich. It is now 165 days since the guys at Camelot handed me a ridiculously large cheque (size of the piece of paper-wise) for a ridiculously huge amount of cash. And I'm just about getting to the point where I can sit back and enjoy it without people bugging me for decisions all the time. Like, "Am I sure I don't want to buy a decent car instead of that ratty old banger?"

Spoke too soon. Here's Irwin to tell me the IT guy has got a problem with jumping someone else's IP address so no one can work out where I'm sending this stuff from. So do I persuade the guy I've got now to get on with the job or hire someone else? Decisions, bloody decisions.