Letters to my sons.

Dear Boys,

It has been a while since my last post. Sorry for that. Loads of stuff has happened and I have invested in some technology that will enable me write more posts more often.

We have a general election coming up and I have some adult themes that I want to share with you. You are too young to understand these posts but by the time you are hopefully they will be old history and not relevant.

Dear Sons,

Today Newcastle United were relegated from the Premiership. 

I’ll write up fully where things went wrong but here are the main points:

1. Money has continually been taken out of the club instead of being reinvested.
2. Five managers in one football season.
3. Denis Wise.

Mike Ashley didn’t know what he was doing when he took control, by the time he started to have a clue, it was too late.

Dear Sons,

yesterday I removed the suspended wooden ceiling in the kitchen in preparation for the new kitchen being fitted. It was quite a job and took some inner resolve from me on a lot of levels.

First of all every part of my brain was screaming at me not to do the work and do something else instead. Lots of different negative thoughts were coming to the fore – your knee hurts, you have had a cold and need to rest, there is too much to be done by one person …. I was able to silence the thoughts by simply thinking of Sir Ranulph Fiennes having a heart attack on Everest in 2005 and returning 4 years later to summit.

The job was not that big but it was going to be a long day with lots of steps. First I had to load the dishwasher, put away the stuff already in the dishwasher and then put away the stuff on the draining board. This seemed to be the hardest job as my sub-conscience seemed to object to it most. The rails that the top draw of the dishwasher run on keep coming out and I had to mess around to get the draw out and then back in again. The vocal saboteur in the sub-conscience had a field day with this; why are you having to fart on with the dishwasher just to get the ceiling done? Well he over played his hand because we are getting a new dishwasher with the new kitchen – the sooner the ceiling is done, the sooner the new kitchen is fitted and the sooner the new dishwasher takes pride of place.

I packed the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher up in a box and stored it out side and then moved the chairs and everything else that could be moved outside, outside. It didn’t take me long to have 95% of the wooden suspended ceiling down. The final 5% took far too long and was getting frustrating. My neck was aching from looking up. Also the guys who fitted the ceiling must have run out of screws because a few of the boards were nailed to the ceiling. I was able to smash the wood around the nails – I’ll grind them off tomorrow.

As I removed the wood I was throwing it out of the back door. When I looked out I saw a huge pile of wood that needed breaking up so it would fit in the back of car so I could take it to the tip. My first thought was “I’ll do this tomorrow”. The only problem being that the tip is closed on Sunday’s and I would only get the opportunity to dump the wood a week later. I didn’t want the back garden out of use for today and the rest of the week so I put my mental defeatism to one side and started breaking up the wood. After what had felt like an age I looked at the pile waiting to be broken up and it hadn’t gone down. Defeatism came back in swathes but I fought it again and this time indulged in some day dreaming; I was walking up to the Tete Rousse and looking forward to an omelette when I reached the top. Before my day dream was over the wood was broken up and in the back of the car.

Now all I had to do was clean up the kitchen. This I did and waited for Heather to come home with my lunch. It took another supreme mental effort to get myself geared up, sweep the floor and get the bits, handful by handful, into the bin.

The lessons from yesterday were clear – I am only constrained by my mental application. If I want to finish something then I need to get my head sorted first, then a make a list of what needs doing and then, most importantly, do it!

If I can apply the lessons I learnt yesterday to my Mont Blanc preparation then I’ll have no problems.

Dear Sons,

I read about Sir Ranulph Fiennes climbing Mount Evest at the age of 65. This has spurned me on because I have harboured a desire to climb both Mont Blanc and The Matterhorn.

I attempted Mont Blanc in 2000 and I intend to attempt it next Summer but failed because I wasn’t fit enough. Some of the group went straight from Chamonix to the summit of Mont Blanc and then back to the Goutier Hut. I wasn’t one of them and got stuck in a hut when the weather came down and missed the opportunity to summit. This time I will not be missing out due to fitness. Although I trained hard last time it was the wrong type of training and I didn’t do enough hill walking before the attempt. Also the altitude didn’t do me any favours.

So this time I’m going to use my Power Breathe – bought many years ago but hardly used – twice every day. This should increase my lung capacity and help with the altitude. A few weeks ago I bought some dumb bells and a training book; I’m going to use these to build physical strength and muscle. By watching what I eat I’m going to loose some weight and haul 3 to 5kg’s less up the mountain. I’m also going to visit Chamonix and have a couple of walks up to the Tête Rousse hut over the course of two days and some weekends to the Lake District for some 10 hour mainly up hill walks.

On the nights when I’m not weight training I’ll be using a yet to be purchased elliptical glider. I’m thinking of getting some voice recognition software so I can still be creative while I’m spending two hours marching to no where. Or I could catch up on the documentaries that I have recorded and not watched or listen to an audio book or two.

The Matterhorn will be harder but I have longer to train. I want to climb this in 2011 as it will be 100 years since the death of Edward Whymper, the man who led the first successful summit of said mountain, a controversial event as 4 of the party dies on the way down. Whymper is buried in the grave yard in Chamonix and I have put flowers on his grave.

There is an amount of danger involved in both climbs but with the correct preparation and by keeping a cool head I will be okay. The main danger is on the way down as the exhilaration of getting to the top can leave the physical tank empty mixed with the joy of sumitting can lead to slopiness.

I’ll be updating on my progress.

Dear Sons,

I have spent most of the day thinking about the meaning of my dream from two days ago. Like I said yesterday I don’t believe in messages from beyond the grave but what if?

It is impossible to prove a negative but I’m going to have a go. In my dream my mother specifically mentioned Lewis and asked me if Lewis was with me. But what could that mean? Well taking on the role of a Spiritualist I have decided to interpret this dream. Unlike a spiritualist I can’t ask leading and vague questions to a large audience until I can home in on someone – I can only ask myself questions and that wouldn’t achieve much as I already know the answers. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear boys,

last night I had a really strange dream that has left me in a very funny mood today and the only way out of this rut is to explore it.

In the dream I was at the top of a staircase playing with a toy Lego truck while being bullied by my brother (Uncle Phil). We were both adults and I didn’t recognise the house we were in, it wasn’t somewhere I have lived. I was getting annoyed about being bullied when I heard my iPhone ring at the bottom of the stairs. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Sons,

Newcastle United Football Club are currently on a PR offensive to try and undo the mess that they have got themselves in. NUFC.com has asked for comments and mine are below:

There are few things to mention here.

Newcastle finished second in 96/97 beating Nottingham Forest 5-0 on the final day to finish above Arsenal in Wengers first (not full) season in charge. Now correct me if I’m wrong but I think that Arsenal have been in the top 4 ever since. Wenger inherited a good team when he took over and has kept them at the right end of the premiership. He also spent quite a lot of money in that time. He may have brought youngsters through but he paid a lot for them, £5m for Theo Walcott for example who was still only 16 and Toon target Franny Jeffers for £8m – who was crap. He paid £3.5 for Patrick Vieira while Newcastle were paying £15m for Shearer.

Only yesterday was the full asset stripping nature of the Hall/Sheppard era exposed in the Guardian. If that money had been ploughed back into the club then where would we be today? Like Arsenal fans who are annoyed at the thought of finishing 5th and the UEFA cup? The nightmare, eh?

Ashley may well have rescued NUFC from bankruptcy and/or administration but I still think the reason he bought a football club was to make a fast buck. A man’s intentions can be seen how he runs his business. I don’t wear sports kit so have only been to sports shops a few times. His DirectSports shops are terrible. Dark and dingy they have nothing going for them except the cheapness of the merchandise. Buy it cheap, pile it high. Ashley needs to balance the books at NUFC but unlike retail he can’t just liquidate the stock and close the loss making shops. The sportswear industry is underpinned by cheap wages and terrible conditions in third world countries with lax rules on human rights and the environment. By employing teenagers at the very low end of the very low minimum wage scale profits can be made.

But a football club can not be run like that. Customers will flock to shops that sell the same gear as everyone else but for a fiver less, even if they have to talk to a disinterested 16 year girl who tuts all the time. Glory boys will hang around a football club but loyal supporters can not be bought off. The pain of watching your team play shit is painful – sometimes that pain is too much to watch but the love never dies. Ashley doesn’t appear to understand this, cheap tickets will not fill the stadium. If he wants to make money from NUFC he needs either to get a time machine back to the late 80’s or get Newcastle into the Champions League.

Villa, the other club that Ashley is trying to emulate with his business plan, have spent over £80m on players and have a fantastic manager in Martin O’Niell. I got to know someone who played under him at Wycombe – the player still gets calls and Xmas cards all these years later. Who can hate Martin O’Niell – the man who made John Hartson into a quality player!!

You don’t emulate Villa by selling one of your hardest working, down to earth, honest players to them. You don’t emulate Villa by creating the conditions that force the best goal keeper in the country to quit. In retail there is another spotty teenager looking to supplement his pocket money with a Saturday job. This is not retail Mr Ashley!

Dear Sons,

while I was out buying my lunch I over heard the following while waiting to pay:

I have 20 please, boxes of 10 are just too expensive. If they wanted us to smoke less they should make 10’s cheaper.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Sons,

loads going on at the moment so now time to update this.

I’m sure things will pick in the next few weeks.

Dear sons,

We tried to sell the house before Ken was born but we had no offers despite reducing the price from £330k to £290k. It was too close to Ken’s due date to think about moving so the house came off the Market and we are staying put for the near three years.

We are going to get a downstairs toilet put in, a new bathroom up stairs and get the kitchen done so we can enjoy the next few years.

With house prices falling like a stone it will be interesting to see where there are in 3 years time.

We will be getting the loft insulation redone now that the government said it would pay half. As soon as the scheme is announced we’ll be getting it done as I was about to do it anyway. I need to block off the letter box hole I’m the inner front door to stop the draught that blows through in the winter – a job for this weekend I think.

Ken is now sleeping for 3 hours at a time and William is getting used to his brother. It will soon be time for William to move to the back bedroom and sleep on the bed Grandpa John made for Uncle Phil about 25 years ago.

Today it was announced that XL Airways had gone bust. We flew with them to Barbados early this year for Lawson and Alison’s wedding, Alison being Bajan she decided to get married in her local church. The flight was terrible because the plane was falling to bits and filthy and the seats were very small and uncomfortable and also very shiny meaning that you slipped forward all the time or were pushed against the seat belt. Flying back over night was worse as it wasn’t possible to sleep. 67,000 people have been left stranded by the collapse. That is a lot of people stranded, most of whom are going to be out of pocket big time as they will need to pay for their flights home – single flights being almost the same price as return flights.

Our next trip to Trinidad will be with either BA or Virgin into Tobago. Grandma Claire is looking forward to seeing you both but especially Ken as it will be her first time.