Andy's Blog

“Someday” indeed..

“You have to do a blog post when you get home!”

Unfortunately, and almost bizarrely,  NOTHING had happened at the point of exiting my usual Tuesday visit to Senior Karate Class.  There has been a couple of Incidents within the carpark, after the Senior class had finished, which almost makes me sound like some kind of pervert hanging around dark car parks at night.. not helped by the fact that both incidents seemed to involve at least two female colleagues from Karate.

“Tart” as a friend called me, and no matter how much you protest your innocence; it only seems to make you seem more.. more… something-or-other!

However, it was incident free.  Nothing extraordinary had happened, apart from me not making some kind of arse of myself as usual, and no unintended double-entendre’s had been uttered.  How uneventful.

I was just musing on how quickly a holiday can fade into memory, and even more on how much you get out of shape during said hols!!  The evidence m’learned colleages;

• First karate lesson after coming back from hols and I managed to completely destroy my hard man of karate persona (self delusion is a wonderful thing); Shouting Ichi! Ni! San! Shi!… and then squeaking like mickey mouse on helium “Go”, “Roku”…
• The Alfa Romeo has decided to act all Alfa Romeo’y and decide it wanted 450 of my finest english pounds to be spent on its lower regions (brakes, disks and bearings)
• My sunburnt head has now turned to a peeling head.. I look like a “shoulda used head-n-shoulders” disaster advert.
• 563 work emails on the first day back is never a fun thing to behold.
• The holidays are not even a week old and I feel like I need another one.

Ah well, there was always Senior Karate?  Unfortunately I was bloody awful!  I felt like somebody had strapped lead weights to the ends of my arms, which wasn’t clever as Sensei was not in a very forgiving mood today.  I think I caused at least one of the press-ups that were metered out as punishments, but not all the others.  I was sweating, heaving and panting by the end of the lesson.  Nice!

I wouldn’t mind all that, but it didn’t look like I had even BEEN on holiday.  I stood next to Libs and looked all wan and pale next to her gorgeously tanned self.. Even Sarah looked more tanned than me, and as far as I am aware she spent the past two weeks in rainy England.  *sigh*

..and then to top it all off, as I stand in line at a BP Station to purchase some much needed cold beverage to throw down my parched throat, I hear from the two young teenage girls standing behind me; “Eeeerrgh! You’d think he’d be too old to need those!”.  I look down at the pack of chewing gum I have also decided to impulse buy.

I look up at the two girls, who look back at me like I’m the perv as described in the first paragraph of this blog post.

“Whoah, hang on…”

But it’s too late, they wander off.  So now it’s official, I am now too old for chewing gum, or worse.  I woulda given them a reverse shuto to the heads, but I was feeling my age and couldn’t even if I wanted to.

*double sigh* time to check the calendar and figure out when the next holiday is…

I am sat somewhere in the Toledo countryside with a killer view, a sunburnt head, arms which I am trying to convince myself are going a nice shade of oaken brown, the ubiquitous iphone playing random tracks, the bikes parked close by and the bustle of mi compadres finishing off their meal and starting to chill.

The complete lack of light around means that we have an unimpeded view of the stars above, which makes for a heck of a view whilst supping on the cold cans of beer that have magically appeared from somewhere.  Trying to decide whether to get under canvas tonight or just stay out in the open; Neither option seems to deter the mosquitoes from using all of us as snacking boards, at least outside is a wee bit cooler (temperature is apparently about 26c tonight!).

Tomorrow we’ll see how far we get on the bikes; there’s no particular route or plan, we just point ourselves in a random direction and see what’s around the next corner.  Probably not the most efficient way of getting from A to B, but it’s a damn site more pleasant and is loads more fun when it’s time to figure out where we are – the shrugs of “I dunno, does it matter?” makes for a more interesting holiday.

As for tonight, somebody is moaning “what are these?” as they scratch at the itchy, red mosquito bites that are starting to appear on all of us.

“Love bites?” comes an unhelpful reply.

“It certainly does” floats in from the dark somewhere.

…and suddenly the holiday is getting noticeably shorter and “normality” closer.