This is the tail of an ex. friend. Why he’s now an ex. friend will hopefully become clear. Why the train-set? Well, it isn’t actually about a train-set, it could be any physical object that you have a passion or an obsession about, but I’ll use a train-set as the the real item is a bit more complex to explain.

So this guy has been working on this train-set for probably the last five years or so. It can be said that it had turned into a bit of an obsession. I’ve been emailed countless times about it, with diagrams, presentations, magazine articles etc. I’ve been shown it at various stages of construction. Now I have a passing interest in train-sets, but certainly not to the same degree. I was even at a rather awkward dinner party where we were subjected to a power point presentation of the damn thing, where this woman just looked rather uncomfortable and made polite excuses and left as soon as possible.

Now recently, again I’ve been asked, “My train-set is setup, would you be interested in coming to play with it?”, to which I politely declined. And messaged yet again, “I’d like to show you my train-set again as it wasn’t completely finished the last time you saw it. Would you like a demo and a play with it? I could do demo, then lunch, or demo, dinner and pub?”. Note, there was absolutely no option of not having a demo. I really didn’t want another demo, I’d seen enough before. I politely replied, “I’ll skip the demo, but let’s do lunch and catch up.”. To which I got the single response, “Fuck you then”. And that was the last I heard from him.

I’d like to point out in he past I’ve invited this person down and given them a number of options on things to do, including things like doing an ‘escape room’, which I thought could be fun, but they turned round quite bluntly and said, ‘no to the escape room’. Note at this point I didn’t say, “Fuck you then”. I also know when you have contacted another friend that they offered to take you up in their light aircraft, again you said, ‘no’, and I’m sure they would have accepted your response with no quibble. So how come you are perfectly entitled to say ‘no’ to things you are not interested in, but i’s not acceptable for people to say ‘no’ to you if they are not interested?

And I haven’t heard from him since. Maybe you should respect other peoples preferences more, then maybe you would have more friends to hang around with. I wish you well with your life, but until you see the error of your ways, I say, ‘fuck you then’, and never try and contact me again.

So yesterday I was going through my ‘to do’ list and the next thing (well not next, but got round to doing it) was to book my train to Weymouth in June. So created a Trainline account, did a search, found the best deal and then bought the tickets, thought it was a bit cheap at £18. Then the e-tickets arrived, quickly looked and it said ‘child’, that’s why it was cheap. Go back on the site and there in the very small print it says ‘child’. So it doesn’t default to an adult ticket, it goes for a kid. So now try and modify the booking, you can change the time, the day (all for an ‘admin’ fee of course) but not the person. You could even add an OAP rail card for the child. Only option was to go for a refund, but after said ‘admin’ fee and the fact that one ticket wasn’t refundable the total amount of the refund was £1.45. So I went for that. Tried then to book the correct ticket, this came to £38. So had a look on Uber instead, exact same ticket was £30, so bought it there. Decided I was going to contact Trainline and have a moan. Managed to get on their live chat first thing. Oddly they were very responsive and after explaining that their website was a bit shit, they actually gave me a full refund, ‘just this once’. Bet I’m not the first customer to regress back to a child.

So this morning started early doors with a ride to the track where I spent most of the day doing a ‘First aid at work course’. Which was very good, I learnt CPR, the recovery position, pulled a babies head off etc.

Went home and walked the dogs. Then as I’d been sat on my arse most of the day I went for a very long walk. Now at one point I was crossing a very busy A road and a car turned right out of a traffic filter and came right at me, it was a green man, I hopped out of the way just iin time. This was directly outside a police station and there were several police cars in other lanes. She turned right into a one way system, the wrong way. Blue lights came on and he followed the car just over the junction and blocked it off before anyone came the other way. Now I do have a healthy dislike for the police, some can be quite nice, but most I’ve known or come across, think they are judge, jury and executioner and that they are way above everybody else. Case in point, I walked down towards the police car incase they’d like to speak to me, check I was alright or indeed take a statement. No, they were giving the occupants directions. Police bloke pokes his head out of the car looks at me and says, ‘yes?’. I said I was the one on the crossing at the time, he just said in a rather obnoxious manner, ‘We’ll deal with it from here thank you’, and just turned away. I just said, ‘Fine’ and walked away. Next time you bang on my door and ask me if I saw anyone vandalising the phone box across the road again, I’ll just reply, ‘I’m sure you can deal with it from here.’, and close the door. Twat.

Why is it done right? The casting is perfect. Joe Locke (Charlie) is openly gay, Kit Connor (Nick) hasn’t revealed his sexuality (and why the bloody hell should he), but if he doesn’t have a passing interest in boys there is no way that magic would have appeared on screen. And they are both seventeen at the time of filming playing a fourteen and fifteen year-old.

If you want to watch a very heart warming and non-cheesy bisexual encounter in a true love story you really do need to binge this Netflix series. It can be done in four hours, then reserve another four to watch the magic again. Plus Olivia Colman as Nick’s mum is magical and the bonus of Stephen Fry doing the sports day voice over. I really do hope there is a season two.

Amazon take note: Evan Hansen IS NOT thirty-five.

Bristol tools was a shop on Gloucester Road that was established in 1973. I bought a centre punch there when I was 11. Over the years I did a fair amount of shopping there, they specialised in hand tools.

But on August 31st 2002 (my record keeping is somewhat anal) I went in carrying a piece of brake cable. I asked specially for ‘something that would cut this’. I was handed a pair of snips, I then proceeded to cut the cable with them. The man grabbed them off me and said, ‘Sold!’, ‘I can’t sell them as new now can I’. I didn’t point out at the time that if I’d specially asked for a product to serve a certain purpose and it failed to perform that duty then I could get a refund anyway. I paid and left and vowed never to return. I didn’t.

I noticed when walking past recently that the shop went from a double unit to a single one and that it started to sell a large range of ‘tat’ including old vinyl records. A couple of weeks ago in passing I saw that it had vanished completely and all that was remaining was a mural painted on the wall.

I should feel perhaps a little sad that this almost 50 year old shop has now ceased trading, but then I wonder how many customers failed to come back due to poor customer service. It only attracted four Google reviews. Shed a tear? No, sorry you pissed me off. I still have the snips. It won’t be long before the mural vanishes and you will just be a blot in history.

Popped into town yesterday to the ‘Sound & Vision’ show, should have been renamed ‘Expensive stuff that does nothing show’, there wasn’t very much in the way of ‘vision’ apart from a Dolby Atmos demo which you couldn’t really tell much as the whole thing was with it ‘on’, so impossible to compare. What I did find amusing though was the shear amount of bollocks available for ludicrous prices. And people believing the hype. Now I’m not a cretin, I can happily hear the difference between a one hundred pound turntable and a five hundred pound turntable, I can even hear the difference between a five hundred pound turntable and a fifteen hundred pound turntable (not much), but I can’t make out the difference between a fifteen hundred pound turntable and a five grand one. I can also not hear the difference if you place it on five hundred quids worth of wood that ‘isolates’ it from the surroundings. It also makes no difference to me if you wire the speakers using cable that cost a tenner or cable that cost a million quid. I had an argument with a guy from a cable company, he was trying to convince me that my treble would be amazing due to the oxygen free content of his five hundred quid interconnect. I pointed to the amplifier it was connecting to which had the lid off and said that it was all fine, except that the amp socket was connected to the circuit board using 2p’s worth of Chinese coax. He didn’t have an answer for that. He could have got away with, ‘Ah, but that’s only two inches long and is isolated within the chassis’. The biggest bullshit purveyors of the lot though are those who sell digital interconnects. Providing the cable can transmit the signal error free, it really doesn’t matter if it costs two grand or two quid, the signal will be the same. So for all these hi-fi reviewers who say ‘the blacks looked so much darker and the colours more vibrant’, you are talking absolute shit.

I’ve worked out a way to make a fortune. I’m sure vinyl is designed to be played at a certain temperature. So I’m going to invent a fridge that you put your turntable in, so it’s at the exact correct temperature. Or for the full effect, offer to install perfect air-conditioning to reduce the whole room temperature down to thirty below zero. Your vinyl will sound great, but the increased treble will be over shadowed by the sound of your knackers shivering. But somewhere out there will be a guy with an Aaron sweater, loafers and an Audi who will spend fifty grand on it.

What the fuck is it with bathroom scales? They just break down constantly. The new ones I had, about eighteen months old now, stopped working completely, they spent all that time randomly changing between pounds and kilos, now they do fuck all. They seem to have a lot of problems looking at the reviews, the advice from the company is ‘do not use in a humid environment’, so awesome for a bathroom then. So dug out the previous scales which were in the other bathroom, they are fucked as well. So now ordered yet another make, gone for the ‘Fitbit aria’, wireless scales. No doubt these will be a sod to setup and breakdown just after a year. Oh and Pokemon go is fairy fucked as well.