Representation versus reality

What people imagine a career as a freelance IT contractor would be, and what it actually is.

A very pleasant weekend

My Mother and my nine year old niece Joanne visited us for the weekend. Joanne is a lovely little girl who adores Sam. Sam was of course in his element. We went to West Wittering beach on Saturday which was very enjoyable apart from being ripped off in the only cafe (more on this later, letter to the manager, trading standards, captive audience, rip off Britain etc.). The beach itself is quite nice with good facilities such as life guards, clean toilets and showers. It is a pity that each handful of sand contains at least one cigarette end. Sam decided, suddenly, that he didn’t like the sand anymore after he got soaked in the sea and covered in the stuff so that was the end of that little outing.

On Sunday we took a trip to Marwell Zoological Park and had another nice day. This time we were not ripped off, the £11.00 adult entrance fee is worth every penny. I hate to see caged animals but they have an active breeding program and are working hard to help protect endangered species. They have some mighty fine tigers and snow leopards, some white rhinos, a herd of giraffes and plenty of wasps. A good day out with the family, most of whom snoozed the whole way home.

The highlight of the day for the kids was of course the big bouncy slide.

Joanne wants to come to stay for the whole summer holiday next year, I think that Sam is quite keen too.

The world’s worst sniffer dog…

…was on duty on Friday night in Guildford along with half of Surrey’s police force (more on the over policing of Guildford later). Rover the drug sniffer dog made a beeline for my mate Dave’s crotch, PC Plod and Officer Dibble put him a loose arm lock and carted him off for a nice little strip search in the back of a police van. Several other keystone kops busied themselves milling around, looking hard, calling for backup (really) and trying to move me on whilst I waited for the inevitable outcome. Inevitable because, you see, Dave doesn’t do drugs, period, full stop, not at all, not even a little bit, well OK, the odd paracetemol. He explained all of this to the nice jobsworth fascists, he also explained that he is in the Royal Air Force and is subject to random drug tests. They explained that the dog was highly trained so they had to do their jobs. Dave explained that the dog was most definitely not highly trained. He emerged half an hour later looking very angry, walking funny and muttering about complaints procedures. We then went and got completely mindlessly rat faced on legal drugs in the shape of jugs of long Island Iced Teas (doubles of course) and sambuka.

Update: I did a bit of digging and found that the world’s most useless sniffer dog was part of the ongoing Surrey Police Operation Dragnet which is targeting the dealing and use of crack cocaine in the Guildford area. Perhaps they might explain to PC Rover that he needs to stop pissing about and take his job a little more seriously, my mum’s terrier could do better. And, perhaps if this had been explained at the time my friend Dave and myself might have been much more understanding of the whole situation.

From the mouths of babes…

Cathy and Sam were walking along the street yesterday, the vicar ws behind them. Sam turned and said “Look Mummy, a funny man” quickly followed by “I not like him!”.