“Everywhere” by Michelle Branch plays acoustically on the acoustic speakers… “Turn it inside out so I can see the part of you that’s drifting over me. And when I wake you’re never there. But when I sleep you’re everywhere. You’re everywhere…”

A year had passed again and it was time for Comic Relief again. On Friday, they took over the first few channels of terrestrial TV in the name of charity for the annual fundraiser. Charities are doing good things for the less fortunate, but so many of the events are so formal and to be frank, boring. That is, except for comic relief, where the power of comedy is used for a good cause. It addresses the nation too; encouraging folk to go out and do ordinarily outrageous things for charity. I always loved the themed red clown noses they brought out each year. This time the theme was “big hair do” and it was reflected well in this year’s red nose that came complete with squishy eyeballs, a full head of hair and a packet of gel to style it.

[A 2003 Comic Relief Red Nose about to be jumped by a belligerent mouse]

Yesterday evening, as the sun was setting, the view from my window was awash with cool hues of colour. The sky was literally a soft lilac with a gradient moving towards a light blue speckled with dark grain the higher up it got. When the sky gets like that I always have to peel through the veil over the window just to check that my eyes aren’t deceiving me. For a moment, I could have believed that my windows were heavily tinted. The colours were just glorious. In a perfect world I’d be able to move my cursor over it and drag it into my room to transform the drab colour of my walls into something really beautiful. I need to get out more.
I was on the phone with H again, about all the new progressions in her life. The tension has been mounting between her and her love interest at work since he broke up with his girlfriend. I just wonder when the cap will finally come off and all emotions go running riot right there in the office, right there on the photocopier. The rumour previously circulating her office was that the 2 of them are an item, but now it seems that the whole of the industry she works in within London has heard of it. She also has the general reputation of being a man-stealer too. I don’t know whether to laugh or not really, since the 2 of them are only friends really who just happen to be very open about sexual matters in private. Despite all the office surface tension, the most exciting thing to happen to her all week was nearly burning her house down.

Me: Huh?!
H: Yes, I nearly burnt the house down.
Me: How? Were you in the kitchen again?
H: Yeah, and I wasn’t cooking anything. Just heating up soup and I suddenly smelt burning. So, I looked under the opening of the extractor fan and noticed that the plastic was glowing.
Me: Erm, plastic isn’t supposed to glow!
H: I know, and I hadn’t turned on the light under there so wondered why it was glowing. Then I looked right inside the extractor fan and there were just flames everywhere!
Me: So did you put the fire out immediately?
H: Yeah, after I panicked first! Then I called the fire brigade.
Me: What started it?
H: They don’t know.
Me: Might have been grease in the fan.
H: Yeah, that’s what the fireman said but he checked the fan and it was completely clean.
Me: Oh. Must have been an electrical fault then.
H: Yeah. It was probably an electrical fire.
Me: But what was fuelling it?
H: Probably a spark set it off.
Me: Yes, but something needed to have been burning. What was fuelling the fire?
H: Oxygen?

H had called the fire brigade and just as she was about to run upstairs and get dressed into something that wasn’t her pyjamas, the firemen were already at her door within a minute! She was unsure of whether she should have called them out at all since she had extinguished the fire already, but the fireman said she did the right thing to call them out. The best part of this was that whilst she was talking to the firemen in the kitchen, the fire suddenly started up again. That’s about the best time you could hope for a fire to start in your kitchen, with around 20 firemen in the house! H said that within a minute or so of calling them out, they had 2 firetrucks outside her house and around 20 firemen had come to inspect the fire. Talk about bad resourcing! There could have been a cat and a kid stuck in a flaming tree somewhere and they probably would have perished because the whole of west London’s fire brigade were checking out the fan at H’s house. Well I guess since the strike and payrise, firemen have become a tad more keen about doing their job.

The most significant progress in my life this week has probably got to be a new set of wheels. After some browsing around, I decided on a fully loaded Toyota Corolla. It’s a really comfortable medium size motor with all the extras I needed to keep me happy. I paid off all the insurance in one lump sum as well and that totally put a dent in my bank account. I do hope that I won’t have to resort to driving around at night looking for suitable women to pimp, just to pay it all off.

A feature of the car that I hope I never have to put into use is the airbag which is, in no way, an incentive to speed. On the subject of speeding, I asked my dad the fastest he had gone in a car and he said something like 90-95 mph. He said that most cars can’t really go much faster than 100mph despite the numbers appearing on the speedometer. It kinda shocked him when I told him I did 120mph with the SUV when I was in the US. I didn’t hit 120mph once either. I’ll have to ask Yogi but I think it was around 5 times. Gotta love those really long straight desert roads! Quite dangerous, yes, considering the fact that if you’re caught going over 100mph in the UK, you get barred from driving! Having said that, Yogi said that I should drive down to his place so that he could check it out and give me a race. I have a feeling his suped-up rally car will suddenly develop a sense of humour when it sees the competition. No, must deject all thoughts about speeding from my head! This car has got to last a few years at least and I must play it safe so that my insurance will go lower. Hopefully it will be in the “reasonable” insurance premium bracket by the time I decide to splash out on something snazzy(er)!

The whole car buying process has totally brought me up to speed on cars, since before I was fairly clueless about cars in general (asides from how to drive them and how they worked) and just never really had an interest in them. I still don’t really, but I have a newfound respect for those enthusiasts who modify their cars and spend all their income on suping their cars up so that their modified Honda Civics become worth more than a Lamborghini. For the first time in a long while whilst browsing around the dealerships, I found myself saying “Wow” at cars that didn’t look anything like KITT from Knight Rider. Ah, the good old schoolboy days when KITT was the car to have.

One of the funniest things I’d heard this week actually came from a story my dad told me. One of my parents’ friends is renowned for her bad driving and when she took her test years ago, a few minutes after her driving test had begun, the instructor told her to stop the car immediately and got out, telling her “I’m not staying in this car with you. You are a dangerous driver!” Shocking, but funny. I wonder what the percentage is of people who pass their test the first time round. I’m guessing it’s less than 25%, since most of my friends passed second or third time round. I rule!
Another nugget of information that my dad divulged actually shocked more than tickled my funny bone. I already knew that people who learn to drive in Burma are bad drivers by UK standards, but I found out that this was because most of them learn “unofficially.” Allegedly, if you know someone, you don’t have to take a test to get your license. I am not sure what my dad meant since it’s the same in the UK; if you know someone, you don’t have to take a test to get your license. Maybe he meant that the traffic laws were more relaxed, but that would definitely explain why the drivers there are usually reckless and believe in shifting the gears into neutral when the car goes down a hill, because it apparently saves on petrol! Yikes!