50+ and proud of it.

My retired parents-in-law decided that living in London no longer had the charm that it used to(!) and took the (IMHO) brave step of up-ing sticks, leaving their friends and moving to near Herne Bay. We were "volunteered" into helping clean over the weekend in readiness for the furniture turning up on the following Monday. My father-in-law (under *strict* instructions to remove a built-in wardrobe from the 2nd bedroom, soon-to-be the dining room) asked me to give him a hand. I arrived at 10:00am and he had started at 08:00am. "I've managed to get the doors off" he remarked, "it's almost a crime to take this apart!". "What can be hard about smashing out a bit of chipboard?" "Err, it ain't chipboard son, it's 5/8" timber..." I have never seen construction like it: 3" wood screws every 6", mortice and tenon joints for the frames and marine ply used as a skin which was glued on using Araldite. Whoever did the ...

Here's a tip for those people who run MS Outlook. Outlook is very good at archiving stuff from your "inbox" and "sent items" and the like. So when you accidentally set your PC clock to (say) 2013 it promptly moves *everything* into your archive folders. This caused me some concern, to say the least, as I use my inbox as a "to-do" list. So, next time you're trying to bypass a 30-day trial period of some software or other, remember...

This post, I suspect will inflame a few people, but what the heck. My son's AX GT bit the dust last Friday at the MOT station - "Err, we've run out of red pages, and, please don't drive it away sir." So, rightly or wrongly, my wife and I 1, decided to "help" our son buy decent(ish) car. We did the old eBay thing over the weekend and found what looked like a nice Astra in Ipswich - which we bought. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to get real cash out of a bank without getting the Police & Church involved we drove up on Monday to pick it up. The SatNav amazingly held itself together for the journey up there 2 and we (eventually) found the cottage in the middle of nowhere. Nice chap, of some Asian descent, going out with a girl of obviously English parentage and living in her parent's house. Her parents hated him. They were stereotypical slobs - the house was full of catfood, cats, parrots and ground-in dirt. The sink was full of filthy...