Something happened on the way home from the fish shop...

They died! :o(

Which was a pretty traumatic start to our fish-keeping activities I can tell you.

Having done our research, we knew a new tank is a pretty hostile place for fish. The chemistry hasn't settled down and all sorts of nasties wait in store - like ammonia spikes and whatnot - so your first fish have to be fairly robust to ride through that while the tank is "cycling." Once it has stabilised and the bacteria have started working, further additions are less traumatic, although they still have to be carefully managed. We added the bacterial culture yesterday once the water was conditioned and had a further 24-hour wait until today before excitedly setting off to purchase our first fish.

We'd opted for Cherry Barbs. Hardy little specimens, allegedly, and more than capable of coping with the harsh few weeks of a new aquarium's life. Three is both the minimum size shoal for these fish, and the maximum number we can introduce in one go, so we bought... three.

But we didn't even have chance to introduce them to the water, or take the blame for being total noobs and doing something wrong ourselves that killed them off. They were already dead when we lifted their clear plastic bag from its brown paper wrapping.

We figured they'd died of cold. The shop had, rather stupidly, bagged them up while we were still umming and ahhing about test kits, so they'd sat on the counter for ten minutes. With a single paper bag to protect them, they weren't very well insulated from the cold and, being rush hour, it took us 45 minutes to get home from the aquatic suppliers, which proved just too long.

Tanked

After our visit to the spa, we stopped off at the new house of two of our mates to partake of their excellent hospitality & general housewarming. The party went really well, but that's not the point of this post. Nikki spied their new aquarium - a "BiUbe Pure" from Reef One - and was sufficiently intrigued to investigate further.

To cut a long story short, I ordered her one for Christmas earlier this week and it was delivered yesterday. With extreme self-control, we waited until today to start setting it up. The kit contains everything you need for coldwater fish, but we'd decided on tropicals (I've had a coldwater aquarium before and it wasn't a happy experience) so the order included a heater and a thermometer, as well as a few plants and a "volcano" structure to hide the central tube.

The first job - washing ceramic media in which the biological filter (i.e. bacteria) will eventually grow - gave me a painful reminder of my previous aquarium existence as the brown water swirled around the sharp little rocks. This time round, that should be a one-off task as the BiUbe pretty much looks after itself. We positioned the volcano, thermometer, and heater and carried the whole thing through to the living room before filling it with water.

As fishy enthusiasts will know, tap water is deadly for fish - all that chlorine and chloramines - so it has to be treated. The BiUbe kit is complete in this respect too, with a sachet of "Stress Coat" water conditioner to remove all the harmful chemicals. Once we'd positioned the plants and turned on the air pump, I squirted the contents of the sachet into the water and sat back for the 24-hour wait before we can add the bacterial culture that will grow on the bottom of the tank and process all that fishy waste.

To be honest, it looks the business even without fish. Maybe we could just leave it bubbling away in the corner and convince any visitors that the fish are hiding?

Spa-tastic birthday treat

Carden Park. A DeVere hotel famous for golfing and its award-winning restaurant, and the venue for a fantastic relaxing overnight stay (with spa treatments incorporated) which Nikki treated me to for my birthday this year.

I guess those for whom visits to spas or masseurs are an everyday part of life will find it odd, but I'd somehow managed to reach the age of almost-fifty-three without ever having had a professional massage. I know! Shit just happens, doesn't it? So the bit I was looking forward to most of all was the back massage. But the package included another treatment, so I'd chosen (from the admittedly limited list of options) to have a facial as well. I don't mean to imply the options are limited at Carden Park - they're not - but this particular package only offered those two, or a manicure or a pedicure. I wouldn't impose my feet on anyone, and I'm not a nail polish kind of guy, so facial was the only thing left really. And in case you're wondering, yes. I did investigate whether it was permissible to have TWO back massages :o)

We arrived too late to enjoy our complimentary welcome drink, but a "spa light bite" lunch was included and after wading through the enormous bowl of chunky chips that accompanied my beef sandwich I was grateful the light bite was no heavier. We had time to kill before our treatments, which we spent checking in to our room (an extremely well-appointed suite as you can see below), wandering around the grounds taking advantage of the temporary cessation of rain, and relaxing in the bar with a swift G&T.
The appointed hour for our treatments (4pm) rolled around soon enough and we retired to the spa section of the hotel to change into robes and meet in the "Relaxation Room." A dimly-lit room with twiddly sylvan pipe music playing,

a large aquarium embedded in one wall, and a raft of couches, many of which were occupied by ladies in robes. Nikki later observed that the most populous Relaxation Room she'd ever relaxed in had contained one other person. This was positively packed. I didn't relax.

I'll spare you the details of the treatments. The back massage was fabulous and the facial was... interesting. And left me with an extremely gooey beard.

Our delightful evening meal, at three substantial courses, left no room for the cheeseboard which we'd hoped to carry back to our room to enjoy with another glass of wine. It was not to be - we were already overstuffed. So we returned to our suite for what was to prove the worst part of our stay - the bed. Or to be more precise, the mattress. A superking affair that turned into an all-night endurance test as it tried its damnedest to turf us out onto the floor. I have no idea how a bed can get into this state, but it was like sleeping on the side of a mountain, with the peak in the middle of the bed, and each edge in a separate valley. Lose your anchor point for a moment and you risked rolling out completely. Having come without crampons, we clung to each other for safety!

The ecstacy

I love the Internet. It didn't take much more than a few minutes online research this morning to give me a clue why the PS3 wasn't talking to the telly. Armed with this information we took our second cups of coffee downstairs and I got busy with the various remotes (of which we now have FIVE - strewth!).

Along with its built-in digital (and now totally redundant analogue) tuner(s), the Pioneer's media box has four AV inputs. Four SEPARATELY CONFIGURABLE inputs. This is the key piece of information I'd forgotten. My excuse is that you only ever need to do this stuff once in a while (about once a year seems to be the average) so it's easy to let something slip the shackles of your mind. It may look like the box is configured correctly but if you hadn't first selected the correct input then you're actually looking at the wrong set of settings.

The HDMI interface (this box is so old that there is only one) is hard-wired to INPUT 3. So select INPUT 3 first, scroll down the options and what do you find? HDMI: DISABLED.

No real surprise then that the screen is blank! Flip that setting to HDMI: ENABLED (having first disconnected the other cabling options, and removed the XBox from INPUT 3 to avoid confusing the issue) and everything burst into life. Into glorious, technicolour, full HD life.

Well, not quite full HD. 1080i, in fact. Back when we bought this TV, 1080p was only available on really high-end gear costing more than twice as much. But easily good enough to blow yer socks off. We finished the rest of our coffee watching last week's Casualty on the iPlayer, streamed effortlessly and wirelessly to the PS3 and with a quality indistinguishable from a regular broadcast.

After that, it was off to the PlayStation online shop to download some game demos. The wireless connection held up brilliantly, despite the router being one floor up and on the other side of the house, and within minutes I was rattling a pinball around a high-def table in the demo version of Zen Pinball. Awesome.

The agony

Had a small windfall the other day, so we decided to treat ourselves to a PS3 Slim. We've been umming and ahhing for a while over BluRay players, and we know from mates' experience that the PS3 is one of, if not the best player on the market.

What really swung it for us though was a couple of recent examples where our Toppy failed to record some favourite programme or other. Not only does the PS3 come fully wireless enabled, but it also plays BBC iPlayer directly on the telly. The fact that it also "does games" is nothing but an added bonus. We've had this massive plasma screen over four years and never once had a High Definition signal through it, so the prospect of The Dark Knight in HD was positively mouth-watering.

The box itself was delivered yesterday and the rest of the gubbins (HDMI cable, various controllers and a game) arrived today. Even so, I'd intended to wait until tomorrow to set it all up, but certain of the younger members of the family were already visibly drooling so I cast caution to the wind and set about cabling it up after dinner. I should have listened to my inner paraskevidekatriaphobe. Friday the 13th is no day to be getting complicated electronical paraphernalia hooked up.

It all sounded so simple in the book. Connect up the HDMI cable - OR the component video cable - and Robert is your mother's brother. Only with the HDMI cable connected the telly showed nothing but a whole lot of black, and with the component video cable the result was a different set of black that looked almost indistinguishable from the first lot.

Our screen being an older version of the Pioneer PDP505-XDE, all of the connections go through a media box, which has two sets of connectors for component in. I tried the other set. Bingo! Er... well... not "bingo" exactly. More "go bin". The picture from the PS3 was in black and white! And very grainy. Still, it was enough to run through the set-up procedures, download the odd firmware upgrade and that sort of thing. We even tried The Dark Knight for a few painful seconds.

Four years' waiting for this?! It's enough to make a grown man cry.

The oracle says

My Google horoscope for yesterday was uncannily accurate, I meant to mention. I usually read these things with casual indifference, but this one induced a small double-take:
If you have been blinded by your own dreams, your high hopes may be dashed in an instant today when you realize the truth of what's actually happening. But this flash of awareness also contains the seeds of a more realistic plan that can pave the path to your future. Don't be overly dramatic about your own version of paradise lost. Just pick up the pieces, adjust your plan and try again. A touch of disappointment can fuel your greatest success.

Hmm...

Bad news from New York

I emailed that New York agent this afternoon. The one I've been waiting on for 12 weeks. Thirteen, actually, as I realised this morning that I'd counted up wrong. They were a week overdue, so I sent them a memory jogger email. Hello, it's me. I'm still here. Still waiting. How are you getting on?

I received a reply within five minutes. Basically it said "thanks, but no thanks." But she didn't pass up the chance to pepper the 'no thanks' with a little disdain. Just for added piquancy you understand: "I had the chance to read it and while I enjoy the premise, I didn't feel the execution made the book stand out from others in its category."

Ouch.

Gotta tell you lady, it's still better than a lot of the crap I've waded through in the last three years of being a book club member. But reactions like that are frowned upon in writing circles. You have to suck it up, grit your teeth, and get on with it. Which is exactly what I did. Since receiving that dismissive reply I've sent out another ten queries. And I'll keep sending them out until I get that 'yes.' That one yes. The only yes I need.

The thing that pissed me off more than the rejection, was that the tone of the rest of the email implied she'd finished reading the manuscript (or read as far as she needed to make up her mind) weeks ago, but hadn't bothered to let me know the result. So I've wasted weeks of potential querying time waiting for someone who had already decided to say no.

You can bet I won't be making that mistake again.

First frost

One of my annual checkpoints occurred this morning. The first day on which I'm forced to scrape the ice off the car before I can drive off. We've had an unseasonably mild November so far, but that's all over now. Now all we have to look forward to is three months or so of scraping, and waiting for the blower to clear the windscreen. Or driving off too soon, and bending almost double behind the steering wheel to peer blearily through the thin sliver of glass that's not opaqued by the dust and engine gases that belch out from the demister vents and mingle with passenger breath to create an immovable oily film.

I could clean the windows I suppose, which would make the demister marginally more efficient, but I've never got on well with car cleaning. Something for which the word "nugatory" was invented, if you ask me.

Family dinners

We headed over to Penistone yesterday afternoon for an evening in the company of my cousin and her husband. We don't see them very often (a couple of times a year on average) but when we do there's always lots of news to catch up on, and no matter how long we're there the conversation never dries up.

As it happened we couldn't have picked a better day, news-wise. My nephew had just that morning become a father for the first time. I say "nephew." In truth that's only a family tradition. Never having had any brothers or sisters(*), I'm bereft of "official" nieces and nephews and I've always felt that lack (of both siblings and their offspring) keenly. Tim is officially my second cousin, but that always sounds so distant to me. Hardly like a real relation at all. And I've never successfully got my head around that "once removed, twice removed" thing. No, far simpler for him and his two sisters to know me as "Uncle John", which they have always done, and, as a consequence, he conveniently becomes my nephew. QED.

So it's congratulations to Tim, and also to Sarah who (as we learned yesterday) is expecting as well, although she's trying to keep it quiet. Must be something in the water over Barnsley way. Don't worry Sarah, I don't suppose anyone you know comes anywhere near this Internet backwater. Other than your Mum & Dad, occasionally.

With those two major news bombshells out of the way the remainder of the evening, with its to-ing and fro-ing of almost a year's-worth of catching up, passed relatively quietly, punctuated by congratulatory phone calls, a most excellent meal, and the sound of neighbourhood bonfire night celebrations.

We returned home to the tail-end of another safari night on our road, which we'd had to reluctantly decline on account of our prior engagement. That didn't stop an intoxicated neighbour attempting to persuade us over the road to sample the delights of her cheeseboard at half past midnight. I managed to convince her I'd had enough cheese for one evening.

(*)More recently of course, I've been blessed with a cracking brother-in-law who, having been a prolific breeder in the past, comes with a ready-assembled supply of progeny who are therefore my nieces-in-law. Suddenly I've got more family than you can shake a stick at!

Sofa, so good

One thing guaranteed to dispel the doom and gloom of impending redundancy is a good old spending spree. I have an almost schizophrenic approach to spending money. I can go for months, or occasionally years, doing a passable impersonation of Ebenezer Scrooge. Living quietly within my means, not eating out much, not reinventing my wardrobe (I'm about as far removed from a fashion victim as it's possible to get), not splurging on any of the fabulous gadgetry that I admire from afar.

And then comes a tipping point.

This time round two tipping points have coincided, with almost tectonic results. Relief at still having a job, and exasperation at our ultimately tired, flabby and therefore distressingly uncomfortable sofas combined to force us out into Manchester's marvellous marketplace and not to return until we'd signed up for this:
Two of them actually: a three-seater and a two-seater. And two foot stools.

We tried to go for an armchair too, but after several hours juggling our existing furniture around in the living room alongside assorted chairs pretending to be something they weren't, we regretfully concluded that the current arrangement of sofas was the only one that made sense and we'd have to stick with a like-for-like replacement.

And I must just add: what a difference seven years has made to DFS! When we were looking to furnish our previous house in 2002 we wandered desultorily around their store and couldn't see a single thing we liked. Today? Well I could almost have bought anything in the store. There were dozens of super sofas of many different designs and fabrics. I think we sat on virtually everything in the store. But this one - the Harewood - was definitely the most comfortable, and also had a good story in terms of its likely resilience. The last thing we want is a repeat of the disaster we ended up buying back then. Something that after barely five years started to resemble a sack of potatoes and which a couple of years further down the track is almost as uncomfortable! The one we sat on has been in the store 18 months and still looks brand new (apart from the film of dust at the back of the arms).

Its wood bits are hand-carved, the leather hand-stitched, it's the first to offer pocket-sprung cushions, and since it's easily disassembled for awkward deliveries, there's no worry about whether it will fit through the door. All we have to do now is wait 12 weeks for delivery.

The axe missed

One thing that prevented me from really enjoying our holiday in the Lakes this year was the knowledge that I was coming back to the week in which the company would decide which of us was for the chop.

Two months ago, a large chunk of the workforce - 6,000 - were put on 90 days' notice of potential redundancy, with the expectation that 20% - 1,200 - would go. Since then we've all been living under the cloud. Not knowing whether we'd be one of the 1 in 5. Not really knowing whether we could do anything to make ourselves a less attractive proposition for attrition. Wondering what life would hold in the Big Outside if the axe fell our way.

I'll admit to having approached this with an uneasy admixture of resignation, pragmatism and hope. Not in equal parts, nor in unequal parts that retained their share of the mixture. No, the balance between the three shifted on an hourly basis. My thoughts circling endlessly around those three pillars: I can't do anything to influence the decision; we can probably survive on one wage and my pension; at least it'll give me the time to write full-time.

Today was D-Day. The day when those selected were to receive both email and couriered postal mail telling them their fate. In a move that smacks of no little incompetence, not to mention an almost total lack of understanding of what their staff have been going through, those NOT selected were to receive no confirmation that they had not been selected, and so were instead left to watch their inboxes and front doors anxiously, all day long, wondering whether they had indeed got away with it this time, or was it just that the message had been delayed?

Well, I've left my mailbox open two hours past what could be considered a "normal" end to the working day, and nothing's arrived. So I guess a tentative sigh of relief is in order.