Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

And so ends Week 10, with our resi­li­ence to life’s pro­ver­bial bitchy qual­ity now quite threadbare.

We took a week­end break to visit rel­at­ives, on the other side of the M25 toll bridge, in hope that a change of scenery and a few sleep­less nights on some­body else’s sofa would see a change in fortune.

Four days, three nights, count­less undesir­able bod­ily func­tions and two poisoned cold-water fish later, we returned to dis­cover our car is not quite as “fixed” as we’d first thought and may now rack up a con­sid­er­able bill as a res­ult of the recent fuel con­tam­in­a­tion con­tro­versy. Oh, and my teeth are now rot­ting out of my head at an alarm­ing rate (in keep­ing with our now lowly social status so now I won’t feel so out of place when at the JCP with K and the local breed of Piss N’ Grim). Des­pite our fin­an­cial situ grant­ing me “free” dental treat­ment, I still have to stump up a stonk­ing 45 quid for a clean. Yes you read it right, £45 for a poxy clean. And that’s after I’ve been grossly over-charged for half a gal­lon of mouth­wash whose not-so dis­tant cousin incid­ent­ally goes by the name of Turpentine.

Oh, happy days.

Since we’ve been home, I’ve actu­ally man­aged to con­coct some form of work­able “routine” for the first time in 3 months and am now this close to being up-to-date with my cur­rent aca­demic endeav­ours, a nov­elty given that the legit­im­acy of the time-scales denoted by my study cal­en­dar have been under strong sus­pi­cion since Christ­mas. I’m hop­ing that by tomor­row I’ll be offi­cially “on-track” so that I can then work on get­ting ahead to make up for the fact that I had to post­pone my writ­ing course.

One more thing, I just wanted to apo­lo­gise to any of you if you’ve attemp­ted to visit this site over the last couple of days. It appears that on Monday night, my web­site took it upon itself to go AWOL. I gave it the bene­fit of the doubt on the pro­viso that it would return within a few hours after hav­ing got over its strop, but by Wed­nes­day I’d gone run­ning to the lovely sup­port people at my host whom, yet again came to my aid at an astound­ing pace.

I’ve always been wary of pub­licly prais­ing the com­pany that hosts this web­site as I har­bour the irra­tional fear that the minute I say some­thing nice, my beloved blog will get sucked down a big, black cyber hole. With teeth. But, given that MyS­iteSpace has been look­ing after my website(s) for almost 3 years now and within that time the sup­port team answered a pleth­ora of my petty trouble tick­ets within the hour, des­pite being on the other side of a whole ocean where they don’t even have lunch until after I’ve eaten my din­ner, it’s only fair that they should get a little men­tion, right?

Right, now if any­one sees a big, scary, black, cyber hole with teeth, please don’t let it eat my blog.