So much time has passed ...

Sometimes I wonder why I began this blog, because I either a) forget about it, b) get side-tracked and have no time to do it, or c) refuse to admit that I'm a lazy shit.

So what's happened to me in the last couple of months? Well, for a start, I was nearly arrested in France - along with my father-in-law - for looking at Eurostar.

L'Entente (Presque) Cordiale

I'd taken Becky and my parents-in-law over to Calais for the day for a bit of a mini booze cruise, and whilst the girls went shopping in the Cité Europe hypermarket, I took Bernard to look at the Channel Tunnel entrance as he is something of a train buff. So we're there watching the trains pass, and Bernard's taken a couple of photos when a military vehicle pulls up and two rather short, uniformed chaps with machine guns get out and ask us what we're doing and that we shouldn't be taking photos.

They then ask us if we're Afghans. Can you believe it? Me in an England rugby shirt, British car (okay it's a VW, but it's right-hand drive) and Bernard with a "Rail Monthly" magazine on the dashboard. So I apologise in French, and say we'll go. They stop us, saying "Il faut que vous attendiez les flics" or "You've got to wait for the coppers". So we wait for the police to arrive, and first thing they do is ask for our passports - which are with my wife at the shopping centre!! So we give our driving licenses, and hope for the best.

After a bit, the officer comes back and says "C'est bon; désolé de vous avoir dérangés". And that was it! He then proceeded to talk about the upcoming England-France Rugby World Cup semi-final ("Bonne chance, les British !!"), congratulated me on having such amazing French language skills, bade us farewell, and pootled off in his Renault Kangoo.

I told my colleagues all this, and now they've now dubbed me something like Mukhtar Ibrahim al-Taylor, and keep asking me to do my "You have no respect for me ... Al'lahhhhhhhhhhhhh" impression all the time. Sheeeesh (kebab).

Baby Baby & More Baby

Well it's only about 3 weeks until Becky's little passenger alights. Time seems to have flown by. Apart from general discomfort and the odd spike in blood pressure, all's gone according to plan. The nursery's done, finances sorted ready, and now it's just time for laddo to put in an appearance! We're looking at almost 9lbs in weight, which seems huge. A colleague of mine told me of a friend whose baby was so large and so surrounded by water and fluid in the womb that when the friend gave birth she lost 2.5 stone that very day. Reminds me of that Peter Kay line "She lost 14 stone in a DAYYYYYYYYY" ...