Mood Swings
How moods can change. As I wrote my last post, the sun sneaked away to be replaced by threatening clouds. Not downhearted, I looked forward to watching footie on TV, only to see my beloved Man U fall to a late goal at Southampton. Then Man City managed to throw away a 1-0 advantage to lose 2-1 to bloody, bloody Arsenal. Am I depressed? Just a smidgin.

But if I'm unhappy, imagine poor Ma Lihau of Beijing who attempted to break the domino toppling record, only for a cockroach to bring her first day's work crashing down. But she was ultimately successful. Perhaps I should take that as a parable for the football season.

The upside for MU is that keeper Tim Howard was excellent and certainly kept us in a game we never looked like winning. Which reminds me, what do Arthur Conan Doyle, Julio Inglesias and the Pope have in common? They were all goalkeepers. Julio played for Real Madrid until a car crash ended his career and he started another, Pope John Paul was an athlete in his youth and A C Doyle kept goal for Portsmouth, who have just arrived back in the top division.

You see, I'm feeling better already.

Peace in Our Time
A very pleasant sunny Sunday morning in Stockport. And complete silence, the reason being that my wife and kids have taken themselves off to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. We had three all day passes left from our previous visit a couple of weeks ago and they had to be used before the end of the season. The original idea was to go tomorrow, but Pat had too many work commitments.

I must say, you can't beat a day in Blackpool and I hope the Valhalla ride (our favourite) is working this time. It is a water ride in the dark with great effects - howling winds, freezing ice mists, tunnel of water and walls of fire to dry you off because believe me, you do come off this ride very, very wet.

Blackpool has this great deal on offer - you give us lots of money, and we'll show you a fun and tacky time. I've going there since I was a child and when we do, there has to be the pilgramage to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the pub where my nana and grandad would retire to of an evening while we grandlings were packed off bed in our B&B. They do a nice pint of Thwaite's dark mild there.

Depending on how Pat is feeling by the end of the day, they may drive through the famous Illuminations which were switched on on Friday. They also might get some of the best ice cream in the world from Natoriani's (hope I've spelt that right) which is on Dean Street, I think, or at least the street facing the windmill off the promenade. I'm beginning to wish I'd gone with them!

Pykrete
One of the 'must reads'of the week is the Doors section of the Sunday Times. Last week it pointed the way to Cabinet Magazine and an article about Pykrete. This was one of those nutty professor type inventions, basically ice and wood pulp mixed to that was easily shaped and used to make massive ships. Geoffrey Pyke's idea was to use it to build a massive aircraft carrier, allowing bigger and more heavily armoured aeroplanes to be taken nearer the enemy.

Incredibly slow and virtually impossible to steer with any degree of accuracy, it had the great advantage that its incredibly thick hull was impervious to torpedoes and other weapons. And if a bit did get chipped off, well the raw material to repair it was all around them.

The really amazing thing is that the idea was realised with the building of the H.M.S Habbakuk although it didn't see much service. The Russians wanted as an offshore prison in Siberia, but it was taken by the Americans to provide a home for Eskimos displaced by the Japanese occupation of Attu and Kiska. It eventually ended up at Bikini Atoll, but even an atom bomb couldn't totally destroy it. The bit above water was vapourised and the underneath popped up like a cork. Not a lot of people know that!

Faliraki Dress Code
The British police have flown out to Greece to advise their counterparts on how to deal with the outbreak of loutishness in Faliraki. The main thrust of which apparently is not to sell cheap booze. You'd have thought they could have told them that over the phone.

My wife has her own solution - brown zip-up cardigans. She says it is impossible to be debauched and abandoned in a brown zip-up cardigan and they should be compulsory wear for any Brit aged under thirty in Greece. That and big knickers!

Professor of Revolving Medicine
So Alastair Campbell is to leave 10 Downing Street. (See BBC) Personally, I'll be sad to see him go. For one, he showed that the unelectable can be made electable through sheer will and application, and just because he used 'spin' to achieve it does not mean that he didn't have sincere belief in the causes and policies he espoused. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that spin can only work if you truly believe in the arguments you are putting foward.

Ultimately, he has left because of the constant attacks from the media, particularly the Daily Mail. Of course, they have their own political agenda, which is to reflect back the views of their readers for understandable commercial reasons, but I think in this case, jealousy played a part. They hated Campbell because he was smarter and tougher than they were, and perhaps because they also recognised that his worldy pragmatism was driven by deeply held principles that they either lacked or offended their own world view.

It is a sad day. The UK's political landscape will be a greyer place without him.

A Doll of a President
I was amazed to read in the Manchester Evening News yesterday that you can buy a George W Bush action figure in the US for a cent under $30. At just over a foot high, you simply "press the button on George's back to hear him say 17 powerful and patriotic phrases" although it doesn't specify in which part of the doll's anatomy they have placed the speaker!

Obviously I've led a very sheltered life because a Guardian article from April 2002 reported that a doll of Osama Bin Laden was out-selling one of Tony Blair. Then I found a more recent Tony doll which has a clip of him addressing the US Senate and House of Representatives in July.

It is somewhat disturbing that the site should offer playthings under the heading of "friend or foe" so as well as TB, there is also Le Worm, Herr Shroeder and Comrade Putin available on the same page.

I guess the talking ones could be quite amusing, but what do you do with the silent ones? Use them to brief Action Man on his next mission in the war against terrorism? Or take Barbie out on a date? Come to think of it, the latter would be more than appropriate for the Bill Clinton doll!

B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was his name-o
Bingo, the older of our two dogs, went in for surgery today to remove two cysts, one on his eyelid, the other on his front paw. Neither was a major problem, but the vet thought it was a good idea to do it now before he became to old to survive the operation.

We literally found Bingo eight years ago, lost/abandoned on Werneth Low. The vet reckoned he was then about two years old, but we don't really know how old he is.

Tonight, I came home to find him with one of those big cones round his neck, reminding me of Nipper and HMV. They may stop him scratching the wound, but the poor old lad was wandering around, still woozy from the anaesthetic, crashing into things, chipping the paintwork and putting dents in my shins.

Truth is, Bing has always been what the vet described as a "polite" dog who has put up with the various pains and degredations that our mutts are subject to without complaint. Unlike our other dog, Jack, who needs sedation for a sedative!

I'm just glad Bingo was insured - 260 smackers would have been a lot to find!

Introductions
Sorry, I should have introduced myself. My name is Ian and I live in Stockport in north west England. Married with two kids and a mortgage.

My age? Well let's just say that if I were to have a mid-life crisis, it would happen about now.

I work in communications in the NHS, which means I get loads of unsolicited calls trying to sell me IT systems or mobile phones and pagers. In fact I work with the media and in producing publications.

I have a big interest in family history, as you can tell from my website. I also write a weekly posting, Yesterdays, which is a round up of local news 100 years ago.

I guess that's all you need to know for now.

To blog, or not to blog?
Blogging? Not a very elegant word, but having read (and enjoyed) quite a few blogs, I decided it was time to add my own musings to the web. So why “Shooting Parrots�? Well, primarily because it seems you need an odd title for this blogging mularkey.

The story behind it goes back some years when we were taking our kids to Clayton Vale, a country park in east Manchester. It was once the industrial heartland of the area, but now it is a strip of green, running from the city centre to Ashton-under-Lyne, either side of the River Medlock.

As we dropped into the valley, I told my wife that I used to drive that route in my youth, to collect a friend to go parachuting at Cark in the Lake District. Several minutes passed, and I was parking the car, when my then five year old daughter, Bryony, piped up from the back seat.

“Well, I think that's cruel.� Pat and I looked at each other, nonplussed.

“What do you mean, sweetheart?�

“Shooting parrots,� she said. "That's very cruel."

Parents even more nonplussed. Then the penny dropped. Parachuting = parrot shooting to a five year old!

Out of interest, I searched Google for the phrase "shooting parrots" and up popped this site. Wasn’t that worth waiting for!