I'm back!

My word - I've been quiet here for a long time, haven't I? I often thought that my posting here was a bit of a waste of time as I believed nobody read it, but then I received a couple of emails or Messenger messages from friends saying they kept in touch with what I was up to via this, so for the last few days I've been meaning to return to my 'blog, and here I am.

So what's been going on? Well...

In the middle of June we went to two back-to-back stadium concerts. First of all on Friday 15th we saw George Michael at the City of Manchester Stadium. The weather was abysmal - as it remains even now and, as we were on the pitch in the "Gold Circle" area, we got absolutely soaked. A lot of people seemed to have stayed out of the "bowl" of the stadium until the last minute though, so when we got down onto the pitch the Gold Circle was half empty, so we managed to get very close to the front, which was good. Lou really enjoyed the show and sang & danced her heart out, and I confessed that I danced a bit too, at least until Lou described it as "Dad dancing" and I stopped. The concert was good, but I found it a bit disappointing as it was almost identical to the arena show he did last year at the MEN Arena. Oh well.

Anyway, the next day we went down to London to see Muse. We decided that we should drive, so we got into my trusty V-reg Megane (which now makes a funny noise when it goes) and I drove us down there. The concert was at Wembley, so we booked ourselves into a slightly grotty Travelodge in the rather "meh" Park Royal area, which seemed to have a BP garage, a tube station, the Hangar Lane Gyratory (a roundabout, basically), an awful lot of traffic speeding by all night, the aforementioned Travelodge and not a great deal besides. After we checked in and called home we set off to Wembley...

...which is HUGE! We also had a bit of brilliant luck as once we'd entered the stadium and bought beer and crisps we were approached by a Wembley official who asked us where our tickets were for. We had seats in block 104, which is in the seats but towards the back of the stadium. "The show is being recorded for a DVD and the VIP area looks a bit empty. Would you like to be upgraded to sit there?" he asked. We thought for a moment and then said that would be good, and so he gave us some tickets for a block right over the players' tunnel with very comfortable leather seats and a cracking view. Bonus! But what of the concert? Well, simply put it was the best concert I have ever seen. Muse were astonishingly good, the stage was phenomenal, and Lou said she could hear my singing over the Wembley sound system. A truly stunning concert, and I can't wait for the DVD to come out.

29th June saw the wedding of my good mate Tara Seroczynska to her partner Matthew Deeney. I'd been in Leeds all that week and the appalling weather meant that trains were diverted and journeys went from the usual hour to more like three, which was pretty rubbish. Well, come the day of the wedding the weather was absolutely glorious - lovely and warm, clear blue skies, and not a sign of rain. Tara looked gorgeous too, and Matt looked very smart (isn't it unfair that at a wedding the bride gets all the attention, whereas the groom gets a new shirt and a hired suit and has to make a speech) and the whole day was pretty wonderful. Tara kindly invited us along to the wedding breakfast too and the meal was one of the nicest I've had in a long time. Afterwards at the evening reception I met some of my old friends from Xpertise and we had a good, if brief, chat before we had to leave. A great day. Unfortunately though my camera decided to stop working two days before and so I ended up having to take the chav option and take photos on my phone, but thankfully they came out pretty well.

The next day was my birthday and, sadly, it was rubbish. It is a running joke between us that Lou's birthday is always great and mine is rubbish, but it does always seem to be the case. Last year on my birthday we were in Santorini but we didn't like the place, I had a migraine, we had a disappointing meal at night, and when I phoned home my parents seemed to be a bit "down" and spent most of the conversation saying that my gran had diarrhoea and was in hospital, all of which made it a pretty crummy day, whereas when it was Lou's birthday last year we were having a fabulous time in Lindos and went for a great meal at night at our favourite restaurant over there. This year Lou wasn't well, the weather was atrocious, and as a result of these two things we couldn't go out at all, apart from for an admittedly nice meal at night. So far I remember my 8th birthday was good (I had a cake shaped like a castle) and I really enjoyed my 30th, but the rest have been rubbish. Maybe one day I'll have a good one.

Work has been very enjoyable of late, and just when I was feeling a bit SQL-ed out I found some Windows XP and SQL Reporting Services courses in there to break things up, which was great, and they all seemed to go rather well. I'm now moving towards Oracle and extending my Microsoft Dynamics portfolio as well, so I'm very busy again with my head in lots of manuals.

So what's for the near future? Well tomorrow we're seeing PJ Harvey in Manchester and next week we're watching The Blue Nile and also going to a wedding, so immediately things are pretty busy. We're also very much looking forward to going to Lindos in August as well. Oh yes, and the autobiographical thing I'm writing is still coming on nicely, if slowly, and now has a table of contents as it is currently just over fifty pages long, with about the same amount still to be added.

Before I go, hi to Nutt and my old school friend Andy Laidler who has recently got back in touch with me for the first time in eighteen years (scary!) after finding this blog. See - I do have readers after all :-)