Oh my God. What a bloody awful day I had yesterday. It was such an annoying day that I'm still feeling annoyed today, thereby ruining my entire weekend. I'm sure you'll be aware of the saying "bad things come in threes"? Read on...

Scenario #1 - Washing machine delivery
We'd ordered a washing machine that was due to be delivered between 9am and 12noon. We'd been assured that they would call us to make sure we were in before they came round. Well, they didn't and of course they came round early rather than late, so there we were, scrambling out of bed and trying to make room for the delivery. So far, so not yet annoyed. It transpired, however, during the 'installation' process that the new washing machine only needed one inlet pipe, whereas the old washing machine used two. But one of the pipes wouldn't stop leaking. (Cue enormous pool of water on my kitchen floor). "Not our problem mate," said the delivery chumps, "You'd better get a plumber in, luv." And they promptly disappeared, leaving us with two washing machines in our not very big kitchen. Luckily a nearby plumber owed me a favour, so I called him round and he came and capped the pipe off and we plumbed in the new machine. No problem. Scenario #1 dealt with satisfactorily. By the way, for those of you who are wondering what we did with the old one - yes we took it outside and it had been 'recycled' within the hour.

Scenario #2 - dog locked in sitting room
Meanwhile, to let the delivery chumps and the plumber get on with things, I had shut the dog in the sitting room, since she likes to meet new people in quite an energetic way. Despite moaning at Y not to shut the sitting room door for the past week as I'd removed the door handle to test the width of space for delivery of the new sofas, I of course shut it without a second thought. It wasn't until I came to let her out again that I realised the door wasn't going to open. After having a five minute panic some logical thought came into my head that I should unscrew the bedroom door handle, screw it onto the sitting room door and lo and behold, scenario #2 satisfactorily resolved. All door handles now screwed back on to prevent similar catastrophe. Thank god the tool box wasn't shut in the sitting room too. I can take comfort from these small pieces of luck.

Scenario #3 - broken down car in middle of busy junction
In the evening we were looking forward to catching up with friends. I decided to drive since I haven't for ages, and I just got my car fixed up again. We only got about 20 minutes into the journey before the sodding thing stopped slap bang in the middle of Clapham and wouldn't start again. After waiting for an hour in the freezing cold, and enduring much pointing and staring at my poor car by passers-by, we got picked up by a recovery truck and taken home. No chance of tasty homecooked food for me. By that point I was so hacked off with the entire day we just got takeaway and drank some beers. Which was ok I suppose. Now I have a car that still won't start. No idea of what is wrong and no chance of getting it to a garage to sort it out for a while. It's steeled my resolve to sell the blasted thing though, and get something boring and sensible like a Fiesta or something.

It was a pretty bad day, all in all. Thought i could have been worse, when compared to another one of my 'bad things come in threes' days, which cost me £400 and gave me a scar on my leg which I've still got.

Quite frankly I can't wait to get back to work.

Because a well-known high street retailer seems to think so! I can't believe that it's not even the end of January and already they have a dedicated chocolate bunny/lamb/Citroen 2CV area. We haven't even had Valentine's Day yet!! Not only that, but they have taken to charging for plastic bags (good idea), yet they are givimg away plastic knives and forks at the exit (doh!). I don't know, it's just that something's not quite adding up for me there....

Well, I've been back from Malaysia for a week now. My tan has peeled off. My posted-on-the-last-day postcards will be dropping onto people's doormats any time now. It's like a dim and distant memory. But what memories!

Amazingly friendly people, gorgeous weather (even the rain was warm), beautiful jungles and beaches. We watched a couple of excruiatingly badly subtitled DVDs - a couple of Japanese horrors (aptly named) - but it was just impossible. Even English DVDs had been subtitled hideously badly. In the film 'Whisper', the simple line "Your move, Vince" came out as "Your muffins" – less 'horror', more 'humour', we thought!

Looking out of the window of the plane as we flew home over England reminded me that however much I might moan about the bad weather and the fact that I don't want to live in the city, actually I love England and I love coming home, to my own space, my family and friends, and my dog.

And for all you fact collectors out there:

• Number of hours spent on planes: 35
• Number of times passport lost: 0 (surprisingly)
• Number of other lost and subsequently found items: 2 (camera case and necklace)
  
• Number of photos taken: 521
• Number of photos that friends/family will be subjected to: 101 (sighs of relief all round)
  

Yes, if you know me well enough, you probably would. Last weekend, when I was coming back from visiting family, I was unfortunate enough to need to use the train 'facilities'. Without going into too much detail, upon completing my task I heard a *plop* and looked down to see that my mobile had fallen out of my back pocket and into the toilet..... I was in a bit of a quandary, having been the victim (and perpetrator) of several incidents involving water and mobile phones over the year. "Should I fish it out?" "Should I leave it there? It is down a toilet after all, and not ANY old toilet, it's a TRAIN toilet..." "It looks pretty clean, and I DO need my SIM card" "The phone is probably broken anyway and will never work again" In the end, after dithering around, I went for the plunge (so to speak) and fished the phone out, ran it under some clean water and gave it a dry off. No, of course it wasn't working....

As soon as I got home I googled "mobile phone in toilet" and discovered that I was far from the first person to drop my phone down a toilet, and that the best advice seemed to be to immerse it in a bowl of rice for three days. I couldn't really see that it would dry it out enough, but in any case I had nothing to lose. Lo and behold, three days later - perfect working order! Very surprised and pleased - definitely one to remember.

For those who don't know my catalogue of disasters with electrical equipment, read on...

#1 Took friend's drunk sister home. Drunk sister vomited all over me. Clothes and bag (and latterly discovered) mobile phone went into washing machine. VERDICT - dead phone

#2 Carried drink from kitchen to bedroom. Mobile phone and drink in same hand. Put drink on bedside table, dropped phone in drink. VERDICT - dead (and sticky) phone

#3 Went to nightclub. Fell down stairs. VERDICT - smashed and dead phone, smashed coccyx, inability to sit down for 6 months.

#4 Running for train. Fell over. VERDICT - ruined shoes, grazed elbows, smashed digital camera screen, smashed laptop screen, re-bruised coccyx. Phone ok though...

I feel like I've saved up a whole load of annoyance since my last posting. Top of my Things That Annoy Me list are people who leave their dog's mess on the ground. OK, I own a dog, so I know that you can't always help when and where your little darling goes, but for goodness sake! It looks and smells dirty, it's unhygienic and particularly in the autumn it's well disguised by the fallen leaves in my local park I've noticed, which occasionally leads to a 'sticky shoe' situation a la Phoebe from 'Friends':

We've recently had a new pavement laid down near our flat. It looked lovely and clean, for about half a day. Then it began to get marred with dog poo, just like the old one. The local council obviously had a lightbulb moment when they stencilled the below image onto the pavement at regular intervals. Do they really envisage this having any, I mean any effect on the non-pooper-scoopers around here? It looks like a 5-year old painted it! And what's with the atrocious font choice? I'm no typographer but I'd like to hear what one of my typographery-type (?) friends has to say about it! I really can't see these poor excuses for stencils having much of a difference. In fact I'm tempted to go and paint polka dots on them one night but I'm too scared I might get arrested. Hold on, if I used chalk, which washes off, that would be ok, wouldn't it? Watch this space....

Also I'm annoyed already with the darker nights and colder weather. I feel like I've been robbed of a summer that was promised but never even arrived. I've been stood up by summer. My flip flops didn't even get a look-in. Still, look on the bright side, at least it isn't raining. Much.

However, even I have got something to be thankful for. Whilst out with a friend for dinner the other week, we toasted those commuters who have the daily grind to work on over-packed trains and tubes, allowing us lucky few to work at home, only having to bear the grunting, sweating masses on rare occasions when a meeting calls us into central London.

We were surprised by the long queues stretching out of restaurants in London. On a Wednesday of all days! No sign of the credit crunch in the dining industry then, lucky things. Shortly after that I heard the great phrase 'dead cat bounce', which was first coined about 23 years ago. It basically means a small and temporary recovery in a financial market following a large fall, the idea being that even a dead cat will bounce if you drop it from a great height. Fantastic.

As my friend Tom asked me "Isn't it about time you updated your 'once-every-quarter-whether-you-need-to-or-not' blog?" Well, yes, obviously it is, since someone has actually asked.

I was going to write about my strange dream, which involved living in a mobile home at the top of the Alps, June Sarpong and a nun with a broken leg, but I can't really remember the details of that one. Instead I'll have a rant about my lovely neighbours. I'm not talking about the ones on the ground floor that play extremely loud music until 5 or 6am. Though they do at least play it loud enough that I can hear the words and sing along if I want to, and they play pop, rather than drum and bass, so that's also better than nothing I suppose, still I do draw the line at badly sung karaoke, especially at that time of the morning. Anyway, onto my 'real' rant.

It's about the neighbours below me, the ones with the small white fluffy dog that bit me and my dog when we were out a couple of weeks ago. The other night, Y and I were rudely awaken at some god-forsaken hour by the sound of crashing, banging and much shouting from the flat below. We could clearly hear such politely phrased questions as "Where's my f*@%ing money?", "Why are you touching my f*@%ing stuff?" and kind requests like "Get your hands off my f*@%ing clothes" and things being flung across the room. I was pretty close to calling the police as it sounded like a full-on bust up down there but I was too scared. Not sure what the arguement was about - Y reckons it was about drugs. If that's true, maybe I got off lightly, just being bitten by their dog.

I do like most of my neighbours really! Except the ones that wee in the lift, that's pretty gross.

Y is taking his cleaning antics outside the flat now. He wiped down the buttons in the lift with a wet-wipe, not that I minded! He also bought us a new vacuum cleaner to try to hoover up the dog hair. I arrived home to a post-it note saying

"The new hoover has arrived - yay!
Have got it out of the box, but haven't
had a chance to play with it yet.
Feel free to do some hoovering if you like."

I read in the Metro newspaper the other day (so it must be true) two stories that just do not give me much hope for the state of the US or the UK, quite frankly.

The first story was around two boys of two and three years old, who drove their toy car down six, count 'em, SIX blocks in a town in America, watched by their neighbours. The boys apparently got stopped by the police when they manged to get onto, and start driving down the highway. Makes me question greatly WHY ON EARTH didn't the neighbours stop these kids as they were driving down the road in their mini car thing? As some would say "Only in America!".
Or is it.

Because just a couple of stories down the page was a classic about the leaking House of Commons roof. It's apparently going to cost £250 million to repair, and all the MPs have to decide is whether they move out of the House of Commons whilst it's being fixed. They would move to the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, which is just down the road. To help them towards their decision, someone has come up with the following figures; if they move out, the roof will be fixed in two to three years, if they decide to stay, it will take 25 years to fix, since it can only be done during the summer recess. And guess what? The MPs are going to debate it for three years before they decide. FFS! If they moved out tomorrow, it would be done and dusted in the same time it would have taken them to 'debate' it. Maybe I should just go and tell them to move out.

Makes me so mad!