nik newark

99.9p!

Britain has a problem. Our petrol prices have skyrocketed to 99.9p per litre, and the country can no longer cope. OK, all of you petrol-heads in your SUVs can grumble about the cost of fuel, but spare a thought for the poor petrol stations, whose expensive electronic signs on the forecourt can only cope with three digits (plus a decimal point). Hence, over the past 10 years, the cost of fuel has gradually ascended until it reached 99.9p per litre….and stayed there.
Now, this is a problem we've seen before back in the 80s, when fuel was measured in gallons. The fuel price gently rose, and when things started to look a little bit on the expensive side, the marketing bods of the large petroleum conglomerates got jiggy with the cats that run the EU, and decreed that petrol should no longer be measured in gallons but in litres. Hey presto, fuel appeared to be cheap again.
But, now we have fuel in litres, where can we go next? Is there some smaller unit we could use? Could we start being charged per centilitre or something? The real solution is for petrol stations to drop the entirely pointless .9 from the end of the petrol price, thus giving an extra digit, and thus guaranteeing that the expensive electronic signs will carry on working until petrol costs 999p per litre. Unless climate change gets us first.

Mowers and Milk Hands

Today, I mowed the lawn with our new lawnmower. It is a red Honda, much like our old lawnmower, only newer. The old lawnmower was old (hence the name), so old in fact, that it predates modern lawnmower safety standards. Modern lawnmowers, you see, don't allow the Deadly Rotating Blades to continue to rotate when you are not squeezing the handle, to prevent stupid people from reaching into the mower to unblock it, and having their hands pulped.
The old lawnmower, however, had no such safety feature, so whenever I wanted to unblock it, I'd turn the mower off, detach the spark plug (to prevent the mower from sporadically firing up), turn off the fuel supply to make it extra safe, and even after all of these safety measures, I'd use a wooden stick to unblock the mower. You wouldn't catch me sticking my hand anywhere near a Deadly Rotating Blade, even after it has been rendered harmless.
Today, the grass was long, and a little damp. Accordingly, the mower needed frequent unblocking. However, I was still finding myself a little over-paranoid about unblocking with my hands, even though I knew fullwell that the cunning rotostop clutch mechanism would prevent the blades from moving at all.
Why was this? I've since meditated on the topic, listened to an old self hypnosis tape, and regressed to a particularly traumatic event in my childhood. When I was four, I was playing with an old Flymo, when it suddenly fired up, and chopped my left hand off, just below the knuckle. It took a full 6 months for my hands to grow back (luckily, I still had my milk hands at this stage - my full hands not having yet started to sprout).

Responsible Parenting

Well, what would you do? Imagine the scene: you are at the beach with your toddler, and he starts playing with the waves. You have borrowed a rather fine Nikon D70 camera for the day. It becomes clear that toddler is shortly going to fall over in waves, and get wet.
Would you a) Swiftly put the camera away, and go and rescue the poor little darling before he gets his ickle feet all wet. Or…
b) Ensure that the camera is primed and ready to record a sequence of shots of his unfortunate salty mishap.
Well, me too. Sadly, Tosha was not too impressed with my parenting skills on that day, and, to prevent such incidents from happening again, has forbidden me from buying a camera of my own. Now, needless to say, I think this is is a mistake - just imagine the exciting actrion images that we could miss out on as a result.
If you'd like to see more pictures of Digi doing things which are funny / dangerous / stupid, please sign the petition below.

We, the undersigned commenters, hereby declare that it is imperative that Nik buys a decent camera, so as to take some amusing pictures of Digi larking about (but obviously, without being in any real danger, like being eaten by electric squirrels or something).