Opened the window this morning to see two inches of snow on the ground - and more falling. Was heading for the ferry to go to the Hawk girls' game at Newbury when the phone call came from Lisa to say it was off - the pitch was under six inches of the white stuff!
At least there was the Bahrain Grand Prix, but dreams of a BMW win crumbled immediately as Massa and Raikkonen took the lead from the start and stayed there. A BMW 3/4 was pretty good overall and did put them top of the constructors' championship for now, but staying there is going to be tough with the two guys in red getting into their stride. Another disaster for poor old Lewis :(
Went over to Westleigh Park early to catch the Portsmouth v West Brom semi-final on the telly. Again there was no cooked grub on offer as the cooks were tied up with the corporate hospitality next door, so made do with a Peperami to accompany my first Magners. Just after I arrived a rumour spread round the adjacent table that Hawks were going to sign Linvoy Primus on loan for the rest of the season.
Got text messages from Hardcore Sue and Jade, both Portsmouth fans, as the semi kicked off, and both of them kept up exchanges with me on and off through the game. The semi was a bit of a bore to be honest, but Kanu's solitary goal left the horde of Pompey fans in the clubhouse, and Hardcore Sue and Jade, happy enough. As the Pompey crowd began their celebration party I crossed the road to The Heron to get something to eat.
Hawks' opponents were Sutton, who've been rock-bottom of the table all season and were already all but mathematically down. The game was no turkey shoot, though; Sutton, able to just play for the hell of it now the pressure of fighting for survival was gone, really took the game to the Hawks for much of the first half, but on the stroke of half-time Luke Nightingale got on the end of a Charlie Henry cross to bag his first goal for us.
After the break Hawks turned it on, and in the 56th minute Gavin McCallum scored with a lovely diagonal shot from the edge of the six-yard box. When Trevor announced that Comply Or Die had won the Grand National, two men in the front row broke into riotous celebratory cheers. 2-0 was how it ended; good to see the Hawks win again even though we're only playing for pride now.
Home for the start of the new Doctor Who. Great story as usual, and I love Catherine Tate who proved she is a fine straight actress. Just as well that's there to watch on Saturday evenings now as Harry Hill's TV Burp finished tonight :(
More crap. Row with me ma this morning. Bad-tempered bloke on the phones just after 1pm who gave me a bad time and in the end announced that he wasn't going to take part any more and hung up. Can't go round Katherine's as she's got a cold.
I need some love.
Not a good shift. I was already feeling stressed as a dear friend and I have had a disagreement and I haven't heard from her since, and then last night while watching The Prisoner on ITV4 I managed to waste most of a big bottle of Hoegaarden by knocking it with my hand and sending it flying all over the floor - as well as the loss of lots of good beer, major mop-up operation needed.
Then today, second call in, I was refused by a guy who claimed he was "backing out of all these things" (all what things? There's only us asking him to do surveys, surely?) A couple of my later respondents did the interviews all right but were still heavy going (the last one was over a bad mobile connection, with a man whose responses to a fair few of the questions - he was answering for all his family - was "I ain't got a clue" and who would clearly rather have been doing anything else. What's more, he took me a fair way over my finishing time.
Then I was still unable to input my payclaim, as I had been yesterday. A number of us - but not all - have been having this problem this week, as our office's new financial year begins on 1 April but the pay system hasn't closed us out of the old year yet. I spoke to Kevin of the support team who tried something but was unable to help me, and initially offered me no advice until I pressed him, then he went away and talked to some people in another room then came back and said to wait until next week to input all this week's payclaims as the problem won't be resolved before then. Harrumph.
To Ferneham Hall this evening to see the regional finals of Live & Unsigned. Outside I saw Louise #3 from my office, with a T-shirt saying 'Vote for Becky'. This turned out to be the first contestant on, Becky Parvin - from Lee-on-the-Solent, so my home girl - whom I thought was very good. The finalists had a range of musical styles; they included a couple of heavy metal bands (one very shouty indeed!), some girls singing ballads, a solo boy and an R'n'B group. Several of the singers were quite good but one or two were pretty ordinary and with a couple of others you couldn't make the lyrics out.
Second from the end was a familiar face - young Lucy Machin, who's performed at a few events in Gosport over the last couple of years. She gave a strong, soulful rendition of Natasha Bedingfield's Soulmate.
The voting opened. We were able to vote for anyone, but the hosts told us that the judges would choose their six favourites and the act out of those six receiving the most public votes would go through to the national final. I cast a vote each for Becky and Lucy.
When votes closed, after a performance from B-Kay and Kazz (whose single we in the audience had been asked by the hosts to pre-order multiple times during the evening), the hosts announced that the winners were about to be unveiled, then said "Before we go on to that, the Exposure Award" which was a prize for gaining media coverage between the heat and tonight. When they declared one of the ballad-singing girls had won this prize I thought "She won't be in the judges' six" and I was right. These things exist purely as consolation prizes.
The way the final six were announced was bizarre - they were called 'Best Band Winner', 'Best Solo Artist Winner', 'Best Vocal Group Winner', 'Best Band Runner-Up' and two, both announced as 'Best Solo Artist Runner-Up' with no acknowledgement that they were identically titled. Becky was nowhere; Lucy was one of the Best Solo Artist Runners-Up. The winner was someone I'd thought was quite ordinary. No accounting for public tastes.
Went outside to wait for Jade and Vanessa. While I was out there I met Becky's fan club and said hello to Louise. When I told her I'd cast a vote for Becky she said "Bless you."
Jade and Ness arrived and we all hit the bar. When we'd been chatting and drinking about a quarter of an hour Jade said she was craving a big bag of Minstrels, and that while she was trying to watch her weight she thought she'd probably end up buying one. She didn't, just yet. By the time the girls were ready to shift their harrises into the hall the show had started, but B-Kay and Kazz were on stage when we sat down - we hadn't missed any of the contestants.
Most of the acts were OK but we only thought a couple were anything special. I still loved Zoe Mead, Jade loved Framed and we all liked the Fazers. Halfway through, Jade got up and left the foyer - Ness and I thought she'd gone to the loo, but she came back with...a big bag of Minstrels. The Daze still had all the enormous, loud fan club they'd brought to the semi, but they didn't all rush to the front and dance this time.
The voting showed just how badly the Live & Unsigned people want B-Kay and Kazz's single to be a hit! To vote you had to send a text message with the number of your favourite act; this message cost £1.50 - and in reply you got a code to download B-Kay and Kazz's single! You then had to write this validation code on your voting slip for your vote to count. In the end so many people didn't get replies - it was the lack of signal in the hall; I had to go out to the bar, where my bald crown got ruffled by a drunk, to text and get a reply - that they had to announce that everyone's text votes had been counted anyway.
Zoe and Framed made the judges' six but The Daze won. Jade wasn't impressed; I pointed out that they'd had their army of supporters there to all vote for them. Outside in the foyer we saw an ad for 'Route 66', an evening of four decades of classic American rock in May. Jade and I agreed to go; Ness didn't fancy it.
And so home to type this and hit the hay. 'Night folks.
Alan is Carole's husband. I guess I'd already given up hope anyway.
Only the Using IT module, an overview of everything we've already done, left to do on my ECDL now. Read the last chapter of the textbook for the first half-hour of class, then Pathenia came over and asked for my memory stick. She loaded a lot of multiple-choice tests onto it, which serve as practice for the exam - the first half-dozen each concentrated on a different aspect of the course, then the last few were essentially mock exams. Some of the questions had answers that hadn't been covered in the book; I knew some of them from working with computers generally, but others I had to guess. Fortunately you could do the tests over and over again - you got the same questions each time, but usually in a different order, with the different options for each question in a different order too. Whenever I got less than 95% on a test I'd move on to the next one, then go back and do the previous one again, and keep doing each one till I'd got at least 95% and knew the answer to every question (if you got a question wrong first time you got to keep guessing till you hit the right answer but didn't get a point). After I'd been working on them a while, Pathenia came over and said "Better than reading the book, isn't it?"
The canteen lady was back tonight, so I got my first coffee break in a month :)
I'd got up to my self-set standard on every paper by the end of the class, so just the real exam to do now in three weeks' time (college is closed for the next two weeks for school holidays).
Home to learn Hawks had drawn 1-1 at E*******h. While that really is the end for our play-off dreams, the writing's been on the wall for a while, and at least we didn't lose to the Spitefires, so I can't be too downcast.
