MarkW

Well, that was certainly interesting... The pub full of paralytic punters had a great night, and clearly enjoyed themselves and the music. We played very well in the end, and even managed to pull off the new and under-rehearsed numbers fairly convincingly. Our guitarist stole the show though, for all the wrong reasons. Apart from him we're all amateurs with day jobs who just play for fun. We're all pretty decent musicians, but are too lazy to practice much. Our guitarist is different: he's a pro, thinks he's God's gift to music, and is an insufferable prima donna. Before we went on last night he told me, the drummer and the keyboard player how he could play our instruments far better than us, which went down as well as you'd expect. He told me that he plays bass better than me in another band, to which I said "Are you on bass because they've got a better guitarist?" which just sent him into a massive sulk. He screwed up a couple of his interminable widdly-widdly solos - including the big one in Sweet Child of Mine which he launched into in the wrong key. At the end of the gig he said he didn't think he could continue to play with us because we weren't good enough for him, at which point our keyboard player said "I'm sick of massaging your fragile little ego. Guitarists like you are a dime a dozen, so if you don't like it in this band piss off - it's that simple." The singer immediately tucked in as well, telling him she'd had more than enough of his juvenile behaviour. The drummer said that once he leaves the band he won't have to worry about maintaining harmonious relations any more, and will enthusiastically fulfil his long-held desire to smash his face in. At this point our guitarist looked close to tears, and went home. We're playing another gig on Friday, so we'll have to see what happens.

Just got the set list through for a gig we're playing tonight. Among the usual stuff are three songs we last played together four years ago, two we've never played or even rehearsed, one that we did rehearse a couple of months ago and made such a hash of that we vowed never to unleash it on the public, and one I've never even heard of. Should be a good night...

And.... It works! Taken around 50 shots of bits and bobs to go on Ebay so far this evening and it hasn't missed yet, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see how durable it is.

This trigger could be crap (and it looks crap, to be honest) but he assured me it does the job, and at £13 I'm happy to take a punt. I don't really have much need for studio flash, and only bought it because (1) he was strapped for cash before Christmas, (2) it was cheap, and (3) it's a gadget and I'm a bloke. Having said that, I've suddenly developed an interest in portrait photography (and by 'suddenly' I mean since Friday evening after spending the weekend photographing my kids with it) which is a novelty. My brother has an 8-month old, so I might branch out into family portraits.

As it's to go on my 5D mkIII I thought there's no point buying rubbish, so I pushed the boat out and bought a Neewer AC-04 trigger at £13 with free delivery. I only bought the flash heads on Friday from a friend who was raising some Christmas cash, and this is a direct replacement for the trigger he broke after treading on it. Apparently they work well enough for light duty, which is all I'll be using it for. We shall see!

I've just bought a wireless camera trigger for my studio flash. These are the instructions, which it says I "must read and fully understood" before use: "Launches device using pure copper material hot boots fixed feet, with camera better of contact no leak flash, low power province electric standby sleep function, thus power very low, a section battery standby work may up a years above; continuous triggered may up 20,000 times, trigger current only 0.01mA, absolute does not on camera of flash touch points caused slightest injury, may for any with hot boots block or PC control interface of traditional type digital camera." Well that's all clear then...

Just before I went to Brazil last month I phoned my GPs surgery to find out which vaccinations I needed. They couldn't tell me over the phone (they don't do this anymore, apparently), but did offer to print my records out for £5 so I could check for myself what I'd had and what I still needed. They did confirm though that if I came back to the UK with typhoid, rabies or dengue fever I'd get free treatment on the NHS for as long as necessary. However, if I wanted to avoid burdening an already cash-strapped health service with my care by being proactive, they'd charge me a fiver for the privilege. I said "Sod it then - I'll take my chances". Then on Friday I took half a dozen plasterboard ceiling tiles to my local council tip and was told that there's now a £6 charge for 'building waste'. So I took them back home and phoned the council to ask how quickly they could clean up a pile of plasterboard dumped on my street and whether there was a charge. "We can send someone round on Monday morning, and absolutely no charge for reporting fly tipping." So there you have it: take it to the tip like a responsible citizen and get charged, or wait until the middle of the night and wang it over the fence. And earlier in the week one of my neighbours had his car wheel clamped for "causing a dangerous obstruction". Had they left it alone he'd have moved it himself in under 20 minutes, but as it was it had to sit there being a "dangerous obstruction" for nearly five hours until they released it. The country's gone mad, I tell you...

You mean people like this guy? ">

I did a long cold ride on a bike with heated grips and just got warm palms: most of my hands were still freezing. So I bought the Gerbing heated jacket and gloves after a particularly chilly trip to Paris a couple of winters ago, and as soon as I got it wired in I went on to make the trip to Holland below: snow and sub-zero temperatures, and I was toasty warm the whole way there and back. My only complaint is it's made me a bit soft.

I think I'm a lost cause when it comes to exercise. I went to the gym last year and stepped on the treadmill, realised my iPod was flat and came straight home without doing a stroke. And I polished off half a packet of Jelly Babies the kids had left in the car on the drive home... I can't even contemplate exercise without music. I play bass (badly) in a local band, so I usually stick all the new songs we're doing on the iPod so I get to know them as I'm running. Trouble is every now and then our singer gets one of her choices past the rest of us, so one minute I'll be charging along to Hysteria by Muse and the next minute up pops some wimpy Olly Murs shite.

My problem is that after ten minutes in the gym I think I must have earned a cake... I hate all exercise. My wife dragged me to the pool at lunchtime and I managed 12 lengths before I was bored with it.

In truth he was doing precisely nothing about the obesity crisis until I showed him how the machine works...

That's what I figured - I was just impressed you could pull your own weight! I'm not there yet, but then I do weigh 100 kg... My all time favourite gym moment was when a bloke who was absolutely caning it on the treadmill dropped his iPod, and for some reason just stopped running to pick it up. He immediately got spat off backwards at speed, at which point the guys on his left and right who saw it happen in the mirror cracked up laughing and all got flung off as well. Within a matter of seconds there was a whole heap of them on the floor. I was laughing so hard I had to lean on the wall.

Yeah, I hate the gym - it bores me to tears. I'm trying to strengthen my left knee and right wrist at the moment (cue dodgy 'exercise' suggestions from Six ) both of which are knackered after years of training on hard wooden floors. My rancid body is falling to bits...

It's a bar at head height that is attached via a cable over a pulley to a weight stack, which you lift by pulling the bar down to your waist. Basic physics dictates that you can't pull down more than your own bodyweight: add even one kilo more than you weigh to the weight stack and it won't budge: you can lift your feet up and swing off the damn thing and nothing will happen. Even without knowing what the machine is you'd have figured that out in a nanosecond when you saw it, but this guy was practically giving himself a brain haemorrhage with the effort, and still the penny hadn't dropped! The sitting pull-down is different, because you can jam your thighs under a roller to pin yourself to the seat and then potentially pull more than your body weight.

I usually assume they're after the person that stole their dignity. They are Just on thier way to book early replacement knee surgery. One of my fitness-fanatic friends tried to get me to do the Great North Run with her a couple of years ago. When she phoned I was sitting on the sofa watching Wheeler Dealers with my feet on the coffee table and a mug of tea balancing on my stomach, stuffing the remains of a Chocolate Orange in my face. "Sarah, I'll be honest with you: it's really not going to happen..."

Just got back from the gym, where I saw a young lad struggling like crazy on the standing lat pull-down machine. I went over and asked him how much he weighs. "A little under 70 kg" he said. He had the pin in at 80 kg. These are the people I'll be relying on to pay my pension...

Poor taste i know and apologise BUT ..... Deal or no deal .... Whats in the box I found a pair of teddybear eyes in a drawer that were salvaged from an old soft toy, and was going to place them in the ashes, draw a smiley face underneath and photograph it for this post, but my wife thought it would traumatise the kids.

Here's one of our two cats, who unfortunately snuffed it earlier this year. Even more unfortunately, the other one didn't.

True. I've heard some interesting stories from the locals this week!

Holy shit dude. No item of personal property is worth doing that to someone over, especially one so young.

Yup. Corbyn is one of those people whose parliamentary performance suggests would be hopeless at chess: he is completely incapable of thinking in anything other than a straight line, very, very slowly. And as for the rebarbative plankton he's surrounding himself with - from that gormless gobshite Diane Abbott to the sanctimonious Shami Chakrabarti - it's all thoroughly depressing. And speaking of the referendum thread, our TMBF poll predicted the result more accurately than loads of official polls. Clearly we are more representative of the British public, and should therefore be forming our own political party. Who's in? Anyway, I'm in Brazil at the moment where I have only one word of Portuguese: Obrigado. To make it more interesting I tried it out on the locals in a variety of accents yesterday, finally settling on Terry Thomas: "I say - obrigaahdo." Got me some funny looks but kept me entertained.

I'm afraid I don't see anything good in having Trump as president. Setting aside his numerous personal inadequacies, he is a man who is blatantly anti-science, whose avowed intent is to shut down the Department of Education or at best drastically reduce its role, and who seems set to appoint Ben Carson - the potty neurosurgeon who thinks that God guides his hands when he's operating, who sometimes breaks off mid-procedure to have a quick chat with the almighty, who has a rather mind-boggling portrait of himself and Jesus hanging in his house, and who thinks that religion is the only way to interpret science because after all 'it might just be propaganda' - to run it into the ground. He also wants to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, and is thinking of appointing a brainless climate change denier (who is on record as saying that global warming is an elaborate EU hoax designed to harm the US economy) to run it in the interim. Trump seems to be most comfortable in the company of low grade dickheads, and that's what he's surrounding himself with. He is a second-rate human being with a third-rate intellect. Hilary is pretty deplorable too, but at least she's not stupid.

Have you considered putting your laptop in a briefcase on your thighs and then using your stomach to pin it against the tank as you're riding? I saw someone doing that through Harrogate last week and thought it looked fine.