Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Last week, I reached middle age.

Most people wouldn’t consider themselves middle aged, but when you lead the kind of lifestyle I do, 50 seems a good innings to reach. That said, most people consider middle aged to be above what it is anyway – average life expectancy is 78, that means middle age is 39. So if you’ve hit 40, you need to stop kidding yourself 😉 .

I spent most of my birthday lounging around before finally getting up at 2pm, having done some extensive research as to whether UK Border Force is as good as Nothing To Declare: Australia’s Front Line. Turns out, it isn’t even close.

I would like to thank everyone for their birthday wishes, cards and presents, it’s all very much appreciated!

This month’s Wendy House happened to fall on Viv’s birthday, so following some pre-drinking where we finally got to use the shots roulette wheel, we headed to The Old Bar for some birthday cake, before heading into Wendy House.

With Si heading down south like a coward, we recently headed over to Little Tokyo for a meal.

Having asked for a knife and fork last time and been provided with kid’s chopsticks, I decided this time it was best to take my own, just in case. Luckily I ordered the steak and that comes with a knife and fork, so problem solved :D.

Hurray :D.

Recently, I had to pull out of the opportunity of a lifetime, to go and work in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, due to health issues.

It was undoubtedly one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. Not least because I had already paid for Elina’s flights and as a Yorkshireman, the idea of not being able to obtain a full refund on anything I’m not going to use makes me feel physically nauseated.

So, the war is on. I promised myself I would take Elina to Disneyland (and by that I mean I promised myself a trip to Disneyland, and Elina would be there too) and by god I’m going to get there somehow.

I’ll see you in Anaheim.

On December 24th, 1995, I was a 9-year-old child. Much younger than the soon to be middle-aged man that now sits writing this. I had already figured out that there was an international conspiracy among adults to perpetrate the hoax that a magical being called Santa existed, but being the materialist child I’m sure most of us once were, it didn’t make it any less magical – who cares who delivers the presents as long as you get them, right?

I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Even if I could have, it wouldn’t have been that helpful as even if I had achieved multiple winks, that would still not have been enough time to reach REM sleep, because a wink is such a short period of time.

So, in my excitement, I decided to take out the cover inserts from every single cassette I owned (remember cassettes?) and inside them I wrote “Chris Worfolk. Happy Christmas 1995!” so that I could remember that moment, and how excited I felt, forever.

To this day, I’ve never recaptured such a strong feeling of excitement. Until now. The reason is the impending return of this young woman…

After parting at the end of August, she will be returning to see me in a mere ten days, and I can only describe the feeling as synonymous with how I felt as a child, counting down to Christmas.

The problem is that I have a lot of other things to think about, and laying awake a night feeling excited isn’t helping my already significant sleep problems.

God help you, FinnAir, if that flight doesn’t arrive on time. You simply can’t imagine how disgruntled a letter you would receive should it be significantly delayed…

Last Friday, I headed out to Tiger Tiger for dinner with Si and Sarann. We were using Sarann’s Gourmet Society card to get ourselves some discount, but on turning up we found out they didn’t actually have our booking down and neither Si or Sarann had realised the restaurant was so integrated into the bar at Tiger Tiger, making it very noisy. So we left in search of somewhere we could hold a conversation.

Sarann was still determined to score some Gourmet Society discount, but the disadvantage is that you have to book in order to get it. No problem we thought, we can just book now. But we didn’t have a list of participating restaurants so we had to go online to find that.

No problem, Si had his iPad with him. Unfortunately, he had the wifi only version, so we needed to find a wifi hotspot. We couldn’t find one in the nearest area, but then he realised he could tether his iPad to his iPhone to get internet. So we sat on a bench on The Headrow googling for Gourmet Society approved restaurants on an iPad routing its internet through an iPhone in order to save ourselves a few pounds – nothing complicated there :D.

Eventually, we settled on Thai Edge, which consistently delivers good food and as luck would have it, they were fairly quiet so we got a table straight away.

The meal was enjoyable though when the time came to pay, the bill came to £43 and not having any change, we gave them £45. This disappeared and never came back with our change. Normally we wouldn’t have minded this, but given service was already included it seemed too much of a liberty for them to assume we didn’t want our £2 back. As it happens, we did, given the effort Sarann had gone to to save £2 using her Gourmet Society card lol.

Last week we headed down to Fab Cafe for the Zombie Prom.

Despite being like death on Wednesday, having been continuously plagued by illness this week, I decided that given I had gone to the trouble of arranging a trip to freshers’ week school disco, and paying for tickets, I was at least going to go for an hour before heading gome and getting to bed well before midnight.

So I headed out with George and Jonni for a few drinks (non-alcoholic in my case) before leaving them to party the night away. Ironically I could have just stayed out as I wasn’t getting to sleep until 6-7am at the time. At least I don’t feel too robbed of a good night now though.

I left my camera with George so he could take some pictures.

Never being one to conform, Josh decided to throw a house party, but not at his house where you would expect, but rather on Call Lane.

He was joined by Rebecca who was also throwing a house party of her own at the time but decided to leave that to come into town as well.

So we hit SoBe, which is apparently short for South Beach and despite the fact that you can see it from the window of my apartment, I’ve never actually been to. Or heard of. But apparently it has just renamed, and I had heard of its old name.

It was an OK place, your standard small trendy bar in the Call Lane area type place, drinks were what you would expect in the area and service was surprisingly snappy for a busy Saturday night bar – if only that could be said for so many of the other bars in the area.