MarkW

I love funerals - I always leave with more questions than I arrived with. The last one I went to was for a second cousin, and at one point in the service the vicar said: "And now, as we light this candle to signify Malcolm's life..." I sat there, trying my hardest not to laugh, thinking "In what realm of fantasy does setting fire to a bit of f*cking candle wax signify anybody's life?" No-one questions these bast*rds though.

The father of one of my friends has just died. I'm prepared to bet that mine was the only message of condolence she received that managed to include the words 'c*nt' and 'motherf*cker'. If any of our resident Men of God need any assistance with sermons and suchlike, just send me a message - I'm always happy to help.

I love it - makes me laugh every time I see it! From the opening lines you know it's going to be good: "We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

[mention]Six30[/mention] - are you the real Dr Gonzo?

Left school in 1989. Walked out of the front gate and didn't see any of them again apart from my best friend until 2011, when a few of us went to his funeral. Still had nothing in common with them, and haven't seen any of them since.

And so you join me as I tune in for the final installment of this three-day training course, and already we've had someone apologise for not being able to attend today because he thought it ended yesterday and booked the wrong days off work. He knew it was a three day course though, so what the hell was he doing on Monday? Sitting in an empty Zoom meeting all day and wondering where everyone else was?

I thought you said that you'd already have an in-depth input on how to use an index... It's f*cking mind-numbing: now they're all discussing the pros and cons of cordless cable staplers and the cost of staple refills compared to loose staples. Meanwhile, I've moved on from Jimi Hendrix to a bit of Clapton...

He wanted to be pointed to the specific part of the regs that said wooden floor joists were classed as a combustible construction material, otherwise he wasn't having it!

In other news, after much argument we have agreed that wood is classed as a combustible material.

This is total f*cking chaos! There's a cockney who's spent ages giving the tutor a hard time over a single question, and all the chat comments from the others are mostly wrong and are confusing the hell out of everyone who hasn't had the sense to zone out, grab a guitar and play Jimi Hendrix hits for the last half an hour.

There is a professional electrician on this course who thinks that a double insulated appliance (i.e. one that doesn't require earthing) is anything wired in twin and earth because it has grey sheathing over the coloured conductor sleeves. Just let that sink in for a moment.

OK, eyes down folks - we're back in for round two... So far everyone has been moaning that the exam we were set yesterday was too hard because navigating the regs book is so difficult. Consequently we are now recapping how to use an index.

It's only a noddy Domestic Installer course I'm doing, so it's nothing like the level of knowledge a proper electrician would need to have. And on the basis of today's efforts half the people on the course are going to die quite soon: anyone who annotates a diagram of a service head and gets the earth and the consumer tails mixed up is in for a nasty shock - literally!

Yup - not that you need it: anyone with an ounce of gumption could get the 60% you need to pass. I was doing work emails throughout today's class and only half-listening to the tutor and still got 100% in both mock exams. I'm not even interested in it - I'm only doing it to help my brother out!

Introduction to amateur gynaecology. Tomorrow is the practical session - we have to decorate the hall walls through the letterbox. Actually it's an 18th Edition wiring regs course. Piss boring...

Now she's talking about penetration, moisture and ingress protection. Over to you, [mention]XTreme[/mention]...

Sweet f*cking Jesus! Now she's set us the task of finding the definition of three terms using the glossary! The instructor is very northern, mildly flirty and keeps saying 'erection'. This is like a really shit sex cam.

Quick update: First tea break now after nearly two hours, and I think we've finished on 'how to use a book'. One person has just messaged the group to say that it's a lot to take in for people unfamiliar with the regulations. IT'S A F*CKING BOOK - SURELY YOU KNOW HOW THEY WORK?

Thanks man - you have now achieved God-like status in this house! It was only five hours. I can keep it going for five bloody days and still spell words correctly. I am an hour into a supposedly 'fast-paced' three-day training course via Zoom. So far we have covered in some detail how to find information in a book by using the index, and already some people are complaining that it's going too fast. I need something (other than this forum) to distract me and keep things entertaining. Perhaps I'll take a drink every time the instructor calls Brexit 'Bregzit'...

Aye, well, my old man was a waste of space. The honest truth is that I do not have a single good or happy memory from the 15 years he was around. Not one. For a long time my greatest regret was that he killed himself before I was big enough to beat him to death with my bare hands, which I would have done with a smile on my face. I'm keen that my kids don't remember me that way.

Ha! It's not all a bed of roses: you'd have to put up with my guitar playing ("Dad, can you stop that - it sounds rubbish and is really annoying") and my cooking ("Oh God - not this load of Tom Tit again. I'd rather starve").

They already do all of that pretty much every day! They have to come in to work with us all week where there's plenty of space to ride their bikes around, open fields to play in and loads of trees to climb. As long as it's not pissing down they are almost always playing outside rather than inside, even though there's an X-box in the tea room that one of our staff brought in for them! We'll be there again today to sort a few things out, and are having a barbecue for lunch (eldest always tries to light it himself Ray Mears style before I get fed up, tell him that this is the 21st century and fire it up in 10 seconds with a blowtorch). We all love camping (we're off again next month) and fishing, and the next thing we all fancy is a 2-3 day kayak trip down one of the local rivers, wild camping as we go. My youngest went back to his tennis class yesterday which has just started up again, and I helped my eldest finish the guitar we built for his birthday. Now we just need to make a short video of it to upload to his homework page and that'll be music, art (he designed the headstock logo and burned it in himself with a pyrography pen) and woodwork knocked off all in one! They both love playing computer games, but they love other things more. As long as it stays that way I'm happy.

This is what I don't understand with my boys: they play together brilliantly and never bully each other. No initiative whatsoever. If my brother and I had had Minecraft when we were kids one of us would have been sneaking downstairs first thing in the morning whilst the other was still asleep to dig a huge mine under his house and stuff it full of TNT.

Thanks man - you have now achieved God-like status in this house! I've got two very happy boys here, who also thank you.

Hello peeps I'm hoping one of you fine and more technically-minded folk can offer some advice on this, because I have two very unhappy boys here. They got an Xbox One S for Christmas, and have been happily playing Minecraft together ever since. It has always been a tad glitchy, but a week or so ago it did an update and then stopped working completely: when they load the game disc they get the 'Mojang' logo screen, and then a blank white screen and nothing more. Other games all seem to work fine, so we are assuming it must be something peculiar to Minecraft. We've been through every trouble-shooting procedure we could find online, short of deleting whatever might be installed on the Xbox and starting again, which would presumably delete everything they'd created over the last six months. Before going down that route we bought a replacement disc to see if that cured the problem, but that hasn't worked either and they still can't get past the white screen. Can anyone offer a technological idiot any help?