We could talk about Wimbledon. I will start the ball rolling by saying that is a pleasant SW London suburb, and in places rather expensive. The common is a useful place for a wee on the way home in the car though you may have to watch your back. The local football club won the FA Cup in 1988, to the delight of many.

Can I add that it has two tube stations and is in the London Borough of Merton.

I once saw Annette Crosbie at Wimbledon station. I can also add that Wimbledon Park is a very pleasant area and popular with dog-walkers.

It is also an excellent safety move if you are half-splined and have nothing but green tokens.

I've been through it on the train but never stopped there. It gave me the impression of looking quite green.

[Rosie] BTW, I trust you actually stop the car.

I'm making him meet the rest of my family this weekend. That means he will have met BOTH sisters (including the one with a pied-a-terre in Wimbledon, to stay on topic) and my mother. And the most ditsy of my nieces.

(Projoy) Not only that but I get out of it. Brentford to Warlingham (22 miles, 50 mins) is just a little too far after the maximum breathalyser-passing dose of Fuller's London Pride (2½ pints).

Is that the club which is now local to Milton Keynes?

(ISP) It is. May it fail in all possible ways for having abandoned its (rather modest) south London fanbase.

You drive 22 miles to drink London Pride?

(Phil) Er, well, not really, but it's there so I have it. I play from time to time in a small swing band. The leader is a Croydon Tram nerd but otherwise quite normal and all the group's CDs have a picture of a tram in some part of the country on the front. It makes my interest in steam locos seem positively mainstream, just like my preferred type of jazz.

[Rosie] Ah, I see. I used to walk 25 minutes to my local most days, even though there were about 20 pubs closer. It's a crappy trendy bar now though. But these days I only have to go downstairs for the best pub in town :-)

What does that have to do with Wimbledon?

When I'm in London, I usually stay with my Wimbledonian friends. It's a very nice area indeed, and quick to get to from Waterloo.

[Néa] How is Great Uncle Bulgaria? He must be getting on a bit by now.

(Phil) Pity that town is over 100 miles away. I drive 7 miles to my "local" (Greyhound, Carshalton). This limits the intake but I don't want a skinful these days.

[rab] The aquarium's quite impressive - but make sure you go to the right one, there are two. Don't go to the one which is so old it still has trilobites swimming around.

Happy Birthday pen!

Is it not the fashion there to stand on street corners and say "wubble" to passers-by?

Sorry rab, I'm in the process of going through my "Black Adder" dvds and I couldn't resist it.

[SM] Don't forget to pin a live frog to the shoulder blade!
[pen] Happy Birthday!

<pedant> A quick internet search reveals that the fashion is to stand on a bucket...</pedant>

[Sierra Mike] I shall invest in those same DVDs. I saw the full set for 18 Euros (twelve quid) in MediaMarkt and am kicking myself that I didn't snap them up.

<superpedant>I think it was also the shoulder braid and one says "bibble", not "wubble".</superpedant>

[Projoy] You wouldn't let it lie, would you.

[Projoy]Personally, I always thought it was "wibble".

Thanks for the birthday wishes. Had a lovely time getting lost in Wiltshire and Somerset with the Dutch Miller, who booked us a romantic night away and bought me dinner. He has now gone back, but left his own clogs on my back doorstep, next to mine. I think it's a sign.

Or if not a sign, a new euphemism: 'Leaving ones clogs on the back doorstep'. A new game, perhaps?

[Knobbly] You're confusing your Blackadders. 'Wibble' should be said with your underpants on your head and a couple of pencils up your nose.

(pen) I hope he hasn't been, er, well, sort of Emptying His Raingauge.

[penelope] He popped his clogs on your back doorstep? What a shame, he sounded like such a nice bloke. My sympathy is with you m'dear.

[pen] Has he left a message in them?

[Duj] I sniggered at your black joke, and reminded myself to make sure he has plenty of life insurance.

[Darren] No, the message *is* the clogs, i.e. "I'll be back". I've just booked another flight to go over there for ten days later this month :oD

[Rosie] I suppose we could calibrate the empty clogs on the back door step to become raingauges...

(pen) Have you heard of the Cloggies, a cartoon strip of yesteryear, by Bill Tidy? They were a clog-dancing group from a northern industrial town. They won their competitions by assault which normally consisted of co-ordinated knees to the goolies of their opponents. One of their members was The Blagdon Amateur Rapist, a middle-aged man who wore nothing but shoes, socks and a tie and humped anything that moved. Let none of this distasteful nonsense detract you from your burgeoning romance.

[rab] You still on honeymoon? You seem to have been there for ages.

I was going to tell you I'd just cut down a bush, then remembered what a euphemistically-inclined lot you were and decided against it.

Nah, tis conference season.

[rab] Just think of the happy days to come when digital technology will make it possible to meet with colleagues without having to leave Edinburgh, and reduce your carbon footprint considerably. Why, I bet you're dreaming of it as I type.

I'd love a conference right now. It's freezing here.

[Projoy] With the advent of wireless internet access these days, you have this odd situation where everyone gathers together in a room in an exotic location reading their email during the talks. Very odd.

[pen] Choose your response:
1. Yikes! The Department of Homeland Security might conside that a threat.
2. Bikini line, is it?

[IS,P!] I don't like either !
In other news, I'm just getting ready for a camping trip this weekend, whilst keeping an eye on the torrential rain out there... yikes!

[penelope] Will you be taking the klompen? Are you worried this inclement weather will cause dry rot in the instep?

Bottled out of camping in the end. Drove home 120 miles after the party. Got home at 4am. It was getting light and STILL RAINING

(pen) V. sensible, but be grateful for small mercies. It didn't get light here until midday on Friday.

Had one (preliminary) interview today, I have another interview tomorrow, then flying to the Netherlands on Saturday with two recruitment agency interviews in Rotterdam next Friday, and possibly another interview back here on Wednesday 8th. This might have something to do with the fact that I still haven't decided where I want to live, or what I want to do.

penelope, you are running around like a teenager. I heartily approve. Luck.

Yeah, it sounds like the same kind of exercise as trying to get a university place through clearing when you don't have quite the right qualifications for the thing you REALLY want to do, but you *could* go to somewhere else to do part of it and work it around a bit. :o(
BTW, does anyone know how Liz got on during her first day in the new job?

I trust that refered to the job hunt and not the Man Waiting in Rotterdam?

[penelope] What is it that you really want to do? If you need a "holdover job" that doesn't fit the bill, keep looking while you work, knowing you can quit when you get the perfect offer (unlike university). I can't belive that for someone as obviously mobile as you are, the right job isn't out there somewhere, or will be soon.

[SM] You're right. The job hunt. I went to see 2 recruitment companies in Rotterdam this morning, and they both seem to think I can find a decent job here, doing PR/Marketing/Editing stuff. I'm sitting at the Man's desk in Rotterdam right now, while he's in a meeting, and inventing a letter of application for one of the vacancies that one of the agencies seemed to think was up my straat.

(pen) Do you need to speak reasonable Dutch to get a job in Rotterdam? I know they can nearly all speak English, but even so it must help.

Hello, very hot here. We've just been for a swim in the hotel pool. Many prohibitions, as is usual, but one is the bizarrest I've ever seen: "No breath-holding".

[rab]:o) Good advice, too, if one reads it in the context of "while waiting for income tax to be repealed", I think.

Please excuse this interruption, but Dunx has had some good news. When you get a chance, you might like to visit the OMC chat game and see what's what.

[rab] As you perhaps know, the sign probably means that you are not allowed to do this.

All very good, though the pool in question was only 90cm deep at the shallow end. And I now have a grazed knee to prove it. Ouch.

(rab) That's three feet, isn't it? Just trying to visualise it. Sod metric.

A sod metric is 1 metre square, usually covered in grass or some other forage plant. In other news, I've got a job offer, less than I wanted, and I have to move house. But I have another interview this afternoon for a BIG job, on an international scale. I have no idea what will happen next.

[penelope] Luckily time marches on, so you will find out what happens next, precisely as it happens.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. I *think* this afternoon's interview went well. The second interviews are next week, which is when they'll give me personality tests to check I'm a loony, and make me do Sudoku maths tests (it's a Japanese company). In the meantime, I am holding off deciding about the other job offer I *do* have, and as all I have is an indication of a verbal offer from the recruitment agency, I think I'm safe so far. Sorry for blurting all of this out at you lot; you can expect more over the next few days.

I wanted to say "think nothing of it" in Japanese to penelope in order to appear clever, so I put the phrase into Babelfish and got back what was possibly accurate but entirely unuseable chickenscratch kanji (which I cannot read). I then went to the last, best hope for mankind, the Wikipedia, where I was confronted by paragraphs of "how to read kanji" (a bit of a puzzler given the assurances on the same page that kanji was so disorganised it would take years to learn even to a low standard of comprehension) and some phonetically spelled-out phrases, which was what I was after. They didn't include the phrase I was looking for, so I googled on "japanese phrase" and was directed to a couple of different sites. When these things finally loaded, they proved on close inspection to be nothing more than wrappers for the original wikipedia material.

It would appear that significant parts of the internet are actually just wrapping other people's stuff, which in all likelyhood is wrapping other people's stuff and so on and so forth. I wonder how much original material is actually out there? (This posting originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Christmas 1954 edition)

I've accepted the other job. The fickleness of women, etc etc... Now to move house, Before mid-September. Aaargh.

[pen] Not the big international job then?

International woman of mystery?