So the last entry may, or may not turn up - the gist is that I'm making excuses for the lack of content and blaming this on frantic attempts to work and sell the apartment. More later.

Heres the link. Check out number 10.

Constantine - nice try, 6 out of 10. Keanu, you're not being Neo now so stop all that acting with the hands business and the falling onto one knee. Gabriel was a bit of a fox though. Travelling onwards, I am once again at a loss for words, probably due to the shock of working normal hours for the last week (and yes, I know its only wednesday)....which is surprising as there is loads going on - not least the purchase of a new flat and the impending move in May. Wierdly, as it was built in 2001, it will be the newest thing I own (excepting a few pairs of jeans and some books). My legs ache, and already I've dropped a running session from my super rigorous running training regime....weak, weak.

The weather has suddenly stopped being winter and now has moved on to a sort of smudgey half baked spring, the sky has no colour and the streets seem to be damp. Not nice, but its still daylight at 5 or so which is a huge relief. Two large projects at work, which I stupidly volunteered for, have put paid to my current slacker part time hours and suddenly I find myself working full time again...as I was trying to juggle these projects today I discovered that I had agreed to do even more work over the next month.....still, I get paid for it and theres a lot of comics out there.

Recent Book: Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis....always makes me laugh. Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh...only makes you laugh if you really really don't like catholics, and a Calvin and Hobbes collection.

So I'm indulging the scatological school boy which lurks within me.....Toilets of the World

intensely, I shrugged my shoulders and with a crack, one of them shot off at a right angle at tremendous velocity and, minutes later, entered a safe orbit. curious.

Off to see Constantine tonight, with Keanu (which sounds like I have lots of beret wearing friends) so expect a full report soon - which will instigate a decent blog session.

Quick recap: lots of work, E sleeping well, and - oh yeah - we have strangely found ourselves owners of a new flat.

cool fishy art.

fantastic......Clean toilets in Tokyo: "Washlet is the machine automatically wash your hip after doing your buisiness."

So help me, I'm still laughing....Dirty toilets in Tokyo: "This toilet is not only dirty but poisonous."

their ongoing mission to 'represent the interests and aspirations of 'away from home' toilet providers......'British Toilet Association - Campaigning for better public toilets for all: "Britain's public toilets were once the envy of the world "

Been real busy the last few days - time spent between work, parenting and new flat dealing. Yes, the time has come to get serious with the buying and it looks like we're ready to make an offer this morning - big scary monsters!

I was in Copenhagen yesterday, and am back their again today, all with the object of securing more work - which seems to be looking pretty good! Anyhoo, I've got nowt else to say and my usual blogging juices are pretty dry at the minute so I'll say adieu, but not farewell.


cool....BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Revolutionary bike 'too quiet'

I was hoping to blog something serious or sensible but when flesh encased bone hit the keyboard, all I could come up with was.......

There are many dangerous things out in the dark, not least shrews armed to the teeth with sharp objects or things with tentacles on their heads.

.......which, reminds me, I broke the 'insert' key off my lap top today which is probably symbolic for something but I'm not sure what.

Interesting news from back in the UK, seems the class war is alive is well. I have some previous on Corbridge and in the good old days of rolling half cut out of the Angel or Black Bull a chippy would have helped steady many a stomach trembling from too many pints/bottles of Scotch or Broon.

Joined at the hip - sinister, or what?

worrying, I also remember reading somewhere that you're most likely to be alive just before a population crashes, which is a bit of a truism but thought provoking none the less......The Observer | UK News | Bad news - we are way past our 'extinct by' date

So there you have it, if I ever consider joining the Israeli army it looks like I may risk a low security clearance....interesting concept, after playing Twilight 2000 for a few years I ended up with quite an indepth knowledge of NATO and Warsaw Pact weapons, thankfully this has long since vapourised (equally, however, I ended up with an indepth knowledge of pulse lasers, rail guns, and masers after playing Traveller) Ynetnews - News - Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons: "'We have discovered that some of them are simply detached from reality,' a security source told Ynet. "

Having just managed to catch up with the very cool BBC documentary about visiting the planets of our solar system I get taunted by another show, which won't appear over here for another six months.....I need cable!.....BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Experts weigh super-volcano risks

Pull ups, weighted russian twists and some odd yoga moves (whose names I'm not sure about but make me stop breathing) have been the evenings entertainment. My contact lens are clouding up, either that or its the fastest growing cataracts of all time - must dash.

Its not often I feel compelled to subject the unwary to such extremes but any article which contains the words duck, rape, homesexual and necrophilia has got to be worth further investigationDeinsea 8...incidently, this was a suggestion and not something I hunted down myself.

CAUTION: Wistful twitterings.....

The usual twoddle must take a rest today, as you'll probably be relieved to hear. I was running again this evening, paddling around the slushly street lamp lit streets with the the slap of my trainers and the odd roar of a passing taxi to keep me company. As is often the case in such situations, and perhaps why I like running, my mind spilled away from the clicking of my knees, and span onto a meandering, somewhat wistful, reverie. I found myself contemplating the last year in sweden, and the fact that the honeymoon is most definitely over. Life is wholly good, but very different from the life I had back in the UK. New arrivals not withstanding, but I am thinking more about the network of people, not just friends, that we tend to take so for granted when we are in one place for a long period of time. K got me thinking about subject this evening when she said 'the times that you really laugh your head off with friends don't happen so often', when we were talking about moving to different countries. This is definitely the case, sure theres people I know and people to laugh with - sometimes uproariously -but never quite as often as with the friends you've left behind, or just don't see so much. As a digression, the sad thing is perhaps, that even when we're in a position to see people most of us -and I include myself here- often don't, couching in front of the television or hiding in work instead. Even the act of contacting people, ironically in a world of increasingly supersonic lightspeed trouser wetting fast messaging still can seem as difficult as when it required 3 days, a man with strong thighs and two horses to send a postcard to the next town.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not moaning here - I'm as bad as they come when its a case of contacting people - but my point is this. The network we have, whether it is the person you nod to when you walk into work, the colleague you have the odd pint with or the best mate whose shoulder you cry on, is absolutely invisible until you leave it behind - even if it is just a hop over the North Sea, and it takes time to build it back up. Thus, the lady who works at the local store who greeted me with a hearty backslap and tickled E's chin the other day, my danish workmate who suggested beers in Copenhagen some night, and the guy who works in the bank, who now says hello and doesn't need to see ID anymore: don't go away - we networkly challenged people need you!

Lewis Carroll - rabbit hole, clocks, etc rather more like wormholes and time dilation I think. And something that the last link lead me to is on a site devoted to diarrhea, what kind of diseased mind comes up with the diarrhea dance machine? And finally, something I noticed in new scientist concerning the internet which can be found here, here, here, and here, but also here as well - one must be the right one surely?

K's gone out, the monkeys asleep for a while and I can turn my attention to the blog. A couple of things have been rumbling around my subconsious recently, not least the riot at an ikea store a month or so ago. You can catch up with this story at the ever wonderful BBC site. Seems that ikea slightly underestimated the amount of interest in cheap sofas and cut price garlic grushers, causing a riot when their new London store opened. I caught this up in the Weekly Guardian which contains a quote from a witness, saying 'people were hitting each other with wooden mallets'. Where did they get the mallets from? Do you pick them up with the blue bags, or are they hidden in the store to reward the real bargain hunters - we should be told.

I stumbled out for a run today, slipping and sliding down the pavements to the now snow free cycle paths, all part of my training for the broloppet, which you can read about here. This little jaunt takes us from the start of the bridge, pretty much in Denmark, all the way over the öresund, to finish in the sports stadium in Malmö. A half marathon no less. I've got no real aspirations of a killer time, I think the training would destroy my knees (pretty much junked from runs over Dartmoor and jumping over things when I was a drunken student) but I'm looking for something under 2 hours - we'll see. The pictures of last years run over the bridge are very inspiring.

Weather: Sunny and below freezing.
Scenes which never made it to the final cut: "Are you listening to me, or looking at the woman in the red dress? Take another look" "Oh fuck, I've been and shat me self"
Animal: The big black pig, again, though it seems to have put on weight.
Films: Training Day, with Denzel and Ethan - gur (gritty urban realism) which was way good and Resident Evil: Apocalypse which if the first one was a piece of poo, this was the dead (or Zombified) dogs arse if fell from. The first movie was actually okay, but this was just so appalling that I actually came close to fast forwarding through to the end, I've seen much much better episodes of Buffy.
Music soon to be bought: Moneybrother, partly 'cos the one song I heard was cool and partly because the lead singer bears more than a striking resemblence to Gary Oldmen.

This turned up in Times' coolest websites, so I thought it would be a good time to return to it....very serene....FLY GUY

well, slap me thighs skipper theres nothing cheers me up more than a good old toot on the ramrod with a fellow shipmate from back in blighty....its sometimes easy to think that you live in a Swedish bubble ('bubbla'- in swedish) and that the rest of the world is just a sitcom played out on the BBC website.

Bollocks, I completely forgot what I was going to write about.

Weather: Cold, so very cold. -5 and lots of snow.
Memorable event of the day: driving lesson in a blizzard, snow drifts lying on the motorway!
Books: Still the same physics stuff as before, though I'm approaching the end (with some relief) of Pandoras Star by Peter F Hamilton - though I will continue with the sequal. I just read some the reviews on Amazon and I'm clearly in a minority here, but never mind. One of the reviews did mention that it seemed to be in need of some editorial pruning, I totally agree, particularly as I keep spotting typos. (which is very rich coming from me, I know, but then I never claimed to be god at spooling). and to keep with the rambling found quite an interesting forum where folks were bitching about the reviewers on Amazon.

Its been a while, and much has passed. I am now, in a rather philosophical sounding statement, permanent. We visited the Migrationsverket (the immigrant office) and got my residency renewed, thus ending the period of limbo I was enjoying for the last few weeks. I had no passport and no residency. Who was I, which country could I live in? Anyway, such problems are passed now and after an amazingly quick issuing of a new passport (one day from the embassy in Stockholm) I was able, despite the efforts of a pissy office worker to put me off Sweden, to get a new residence permit. To my surprise, its now permanent, as a result of E's arrival - which was a pleasant surprise. Whether this means I can leave, if I want to, remains to be seen. But I like the concept of being permanent, its got a ring of - well - permanency.

The other big event earlier this week was going to the skid pan to learn to drive a car on ice and experience the terrors of driving in Sweden. So I spent a happy 3 hours thrashing around in a VW Golf on very slippy surfaces while a funny little guy with a moustache shouted 'brake brake' at me through an intercom system. The elk simulation was particularly memorable.

Shit I'm tired, been out running in the snow for the last hour. Training for the broloppet - more to follow.

Annoyance: 1. People who feel inclined, when you are out running, to shout 'one, two, three' or some such as you run past. Why? I mean, do they run after cars shouting 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow?'. 2. Herbal teas, of any kind but particularly black current. Even the smell (a vile chemical stench) gives me a headache.
Book: Another brain twister, The River of Time by Igor Novikov
Weather: Snowing most of the afternoon, -2.