Entry Title Schmentry Schmitle

I’ve not come on here to get into this whole Tosh business, all I’ll say is that people need to quit being SO SERIOUS. I left someone a note saying "Well it’s not like murder victims get all offended by murder jokes." and it wasn’t well received…. Of course murder victims don’t get offended – they’re dead!!! The point of my comment was just not to take everything so seriously.

I mean, I get that it’s hard to be un-offended if you’re already offended by something, but sometimes people just need to lighten up. I don’t wanna trivialise anyone’s experiences, or tell people they shouldn’t be offended, it’s just there are plenty of things that could be deemed offensive, it’s all so subjective that if we stood against everything that anyone ever found offensive, we would end up in a world of blandness, with our comedy being reduced to a thin gruel.

People don’t tell jokes to make others upset – they do it to make people laugh! If you don’t find the joke funny, it’s just not in your taste, move on and don’t listen to that particular comedian again, don’t buy his stuff, personally boycott them in whichever way you feel is best. I also see people’s point where they say that joking about rape makes rapists think rape is okay, and I see how people think that, but unfortunately, a rapist will always be a rapist, whether you joke about it or not. And that fucking sucks. But jokes about rape aren’t going to spawn more rapists.

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh at the awful stuff, because this world can be fucking awful, and if you go around constantly pointing that out, you’re gonna live a difficult life. So yeah, my point is…. chill guys. WE’LL GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER EH?

So, onto my life. Hm, I wonder how many people read this bit too and how many jump straight to notes to tell me how wrong I am. Please don’t, opinions can’t be wrong, that’s why they’re called opinions and not facts!

Last weekend I spent at my Dad’s in England. My cousin was getting married and Mat and I were invited so we made the trip over. Awkwardly, a couple of weeks before the wedding, my cousin facebooked me to ask if Mat would be super offended if he was uninvited to the meal, seeing as they’d not organised things well and didn’t have enough room for him. I replied saying he wasn’t super offended, but asked if they could make the effort to squeeze him in seeing as he’d bought his plane ticket and forked out for a suit and everything. Also, it would be a little nasty to walk from the church to the reception and have to make Mat fuck off for a few hours whilst we ate without him.

Somehow, they managed to fit him in, which was good. I think they only took a couple of months to plan the whole thing, and on the day things were a little muddled here and there, so it was probably due to this that they didn’t have enough seats. It was a little harsh to immediately decide Mat was the one who should be kicked out, seeing as most of the guests lived on the road of the pub we were in and we’d flown across the North Sea just to get there!

The day before the wedding, I borrowed Dad’s car to drive to the train station so we could go to Manchester and meet some friends/family (Dad was laid up in bed the whole weekend with a bad back). As I turned the car into the station car park, the steering just locked up on me and the car ploughed straight on into a post! We were only going about 10/15mph but it was enough to knock the bumper into the front wheel. We sat in the car park panicking, as the car would barely move forward and when it did, it was with an awful squealing sound. We tried to kick the bumper out and off the wheel but it wasn’t budging. 

We stood there in the pouring rain with dirty oily hands , staring at the big dent I’d made, trying to decide what to do next. Eventually we got back in the car and managed to get it moving, albeit slowly and noisily, and drove the couple of miles back to Dad’s house. It made such a racket when we were parking it up, Dad later told me he thought a truck was unloading stuff outside. I went into Dad’s room where he was lying down watching TV and told him what had happened. He was really understand and obviously, since it was a fault with the car that cause the bump, he didn’t blame me.

I asked him why he hadn’t gotten the problem fixed sooner, as I’d noticed the steering locking the last time I drove it around Christmas. He said it was far too expensive and when I asked how much, he declared "One hundred and fifty pounds!". I was a little shocked to say the least. I mean, seriously, a dangerous steering problem with your car that costs very little to fix and you don’t based on the principle of you don’t fancy being broke?! For the record, Dad can most certainly afford this expense. I even offered to pay to have that problem fixed but to no avail.

A few days later Dad was well enough to drive us back to the airport in Liverpool, roughly an hour away. My uncle and Dad’s mate had fixed the bumper problem by taking it apart and hammering it back into place, fixing on the cracked plastic with a few screws. We’re barrelling down the motorway when all of a sudden, the engine just… dies. Dad starts saying "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckshitshitshitshitfuckfuckfuckfuck" under his breath, getting progressively louder as he pulls onto the hard shoulder and the cars shudders it’s last breath. I look at my phone nervously, seeing that it’s a couple of hours until our flight leaves. 

At this point, Dad reveals that he "hadn’t gotten around to getting the MOT yet…." since NOVEMBER. And so he’s getting all panicky about the police pulling up and nabbing him for basically driving illegally. And I’m sat there worrying that tiny bump might have knocked something loose to cause the engine to die so dramatically.

To his credit, the first thing Dad does is phone my aunt, and tells her to set off immediately and find us on the motorway so she can take us the rest of the way to the airport. Then he phones a tow company who don’t ask too many questions, and then we clamber to the side of the motorway to wait it out. I figure that as long as my aunt takes exactly 40 minutes to get to where we are, we might just make our flight.

We all stand there awkwardly, Dad chewing bits of grass and clearly calculating how much this is going to cost him. My sister stands nearby, obviously feeling a bit useless being neither a mechanic, pilot or loan manager. After 39 minutes, Aunt Mary pulls up and we run with our suitcases down the hard shoulder and fling ourselves into the car, giving Dad and Kate quick hugs which made for a rubbish goodbye. We speed all the way to the airport and make it just in time. 

Dad emailed me when I got back to Belgium to say the car’s a write-off. I feel a mixture of guilt and relief. I kind of feel it might have been the bump that caused the car to die, but Dad had never a fixed an obvious problem he was well aware of, and at least now he’s not driving around in some dangerous illegal car. I sometimes wonder if his driving style causes his cars to get into this condition, as he never sells his cars to get new ones, they always die horribly on him…

All in all, it was rather an eventful weekend, but there were some fantastic times as well as the dire ones. I met up with Jez

on the Friday, and even though we only had his lunch hour to catch up, it was still lovely to see him. And then we invited all of our favourite people to come to Dad’s the evening before my birthday for a mass of cocktails and gossip, which resulted in our stomachs hurting for days after from all the laughter. We even got to that stage of drunk where we disappeared off to the park to climb trees.

And my birthday was pretty good – unfortunately it was also the day of the car dying/mad airport rush but we had a nice meal at Tampopo (like Wagamama but way better) and I got some lovely gifts, including a graphic tablet from Mat (how did he even know I wanted one?! I told no one!) and a ceramic coffee cup with silicone lid from Kate (yet another thing I told no one I wanted but secretly did!).

Mat has just presented me with a glorius looking chicken sandwich, it’s time to go!

XxX