I came home the other day and I found this on my driveway:

Yes, it’s a dead, headless pigeon. Since I don’t own a horse, for a moment I wondered if perhaps I would wake in the morning with the missing head next to my pillow in a scene remenisant of that in The God Father:

Or some of you may be more familiar with the scene from The Simpsons, although if I remember correctly the horse actually gets up alive.

In fact if the truth be known I never did find the missing head and the body was gone later on in the day.

I have to admit I hate spiders. I would sooner eat a ham sandwich than go near a spider. It’s been this way for a long while, and at one stage it got so bad I could not even look at a spider on the wall. For some strange reason, this only applies to spiders of a certain size. I can touch small spiders or those stripy spiders that you get in the garden, as well as daddy longlegs.

Anyway in recent times I’ve had no choice but to become brave and I finally plucked up the courage to start sucking them up with the vacuum. Someone congratulated me and said it had a resemblance to the Nazis who could not stand the Jews one day, and then started executing them the next.

This made me realise killing spiders was bad. So I have finally become courageous enough to start coaxing them on to the end of a broom and putting them outside (this happened purely by chance at first as a spider was leaving the house and then decided to start making its way back in, so I held the broom at arms length to block its path).

Last night a spider decided to interrupt my viewing of Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade (the spiders where I live always wait until at least half way into the film before making an appearance). After chasing it round the living room for 20 minutes with a torch I managed to coax it onto the end of the broom and put it outside. This is quite humane compared with someone I know who recently caught one under a glass, put it outside and then forgot to remove the glass (the spider was found dead the next day).

Me and a few friends have formed an “informal” rounders team. I haven’t played since school, and evidently I’m as bad at it now as I was back then! With any luck we’re having another game tonight - practise makes perfect I guess.

I decided it’s time for a regime change. When I realised I couldn’t run more than 5 meters without having to catch my breath I knew things were bad. Especially as I’m only 21.

So I have re-joined the gym which I haven’t been to in years. I’m afraid to say it’s not as good as it used to be, since they’ve bunged in a load of fancy machines and removed some of the free weights. But it’s only £2 each time you go which is great value. I’m trying to convince one of my friends to come, but I’m under the impression he’s only interested in going to spy on any women who happen to frequent the place.

In addition to this I have started to eat a bit more healthily. All this exercise gives you an appetite, so I have learnt to enjoy the delights of steak, eggs and peanut butter again. I’m trying to gain weight, not lose it for anyone who is wondering.

I almost forgot to mention the 5th of May was a last minute road trip, planned at 7am that day after a strange night away drinking. Initially we had thought about going Gulliver’s Kingdom but decided that, since it’s a theme park for kids, West Midlands Safari Park was a slightly better option.

So off we went, and some photos are below:

Tiger

White Tiger

Elephant

Rhinos

Me trying to offload food on to a goat because we bought too much

And now for the most amusing picture. We eventually figured out that “2A1C” on the ticket means 2 adults and 1 child. Therefore they thought the short arse in the back was a child! Perhaps Gulliver’s Kingdom would not have been such a bad idea afterall!

My friends seemed quite shocked recently to hear that I hate sandwiches (I thought everyone had at least one type of food they don’t like?)

The soft bread together with a soft filling creates a soggy, chewy mess that tends to get stuck to the roof of your mouth or in some cases the front of your teeth, which is just totally disgusting.

I have to admit some sandwiches are better than others and I would prefer:

1) To use brown granary bread instead of cheap, thin white bread.

2) Toast the bread, or even better use crusty cobs (batches/balms/rolls/baps for southerners)

3) Have a filling inside which is crunchy like lettuce, or even better crisps (this helps to negate the soft, chewyness of the bread).

4) Certain “soft” fillings have a better texture than others. For example roast beef has a nice texture whereas sliced ham tends to be slimy and horrible.

In fact there is nothing worse than thin white bread (where you can see the finger marks in the top from the person who made the sandwich when they pressed it together) with slimy ham, topped off by a sliced tomato which is sure to soak into the bread and make it one big horrendous mushy mess when you come to eat it later on. Pack it all up in a tupa-ware container and you can enjoy the unique aroma and taste of plastic when you come to eat it later.

To ride shotgun is to sit in the front passenger seat when riding a car or other vehicle, a phrase commonly heard in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Due to the influence of American popular culture it is also heard in several European countries such as Iceland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom, as well as other countries with large English-speaking populations such as South Africa and Israel.

In contemporary tradition, in order to claim the seat, one must “call shotgun” according to some set of informal rules. It is the responsibility of each individual group to establish a formal set of shotgun rules. Most groups will also include some sort of forfeit as a punitive response to a shotgun violation.

You can find out more about the common rules here: http://www.shotgunrules.com/