An irresistible offer, you say

I’m drowning in marketing emails. I look back through my creaking inbox and we’ve got Travel Tuesday, Cyber Monday, take the weekend off, Black Friday, Throwback Thursday. Sorry, Thanksgiving.

It’s like you can’t even celebrate the systematic eradication of an indigenous people group anymore without it being hashtagged and commercialised. My favourite thing about this time of year is that it reminds me what mailing lists I’m on that I need to unsubscribe from. Everyone comes out of the woodwork. I bought a new mesh filter for my coffee machine 13 years ago and suddenly I’ve got 5% off from my friends at wherever. I like a company that rewards loyalty. Although I’m sure we’re approaching the point where the loyalty bonus won’t kick in until you’ve read the email for at least five seconds.

I’ve got really good at knowing how long five seconds is – I can stare at anything but YouTube for five seconds and guess exactly when the skip button is going to pop up. My fear with that is that they’ll start just having it pop up anywhere to slow you down. It’ll begin with it appearing in a random corner of the screen, but then it’ll need you to press your right smart tap in the bathroom to authenticate and move on.

The real skill will be evading capture entirely. My email address will be written rice paper and I’ll eat it before you can get your hands on it. The ones that get through the net? If I swipe right it’s to bring up the little bin icon. Sure, you hope this email finds me well – but first it’ll have to find me.

We have moved house

We have just moved house, so it is with every confidence that I can say I’m never leaving this one again. I can’t conceive of having to lift even a single box full of accoutrements I’ve picked up through my painstaking life that I may or may not look at in any given year.

Like the little roll-y thing from Japan that inks over your personal details before you put an envelope in the blue bin. I had admittedly forgotten the undiluted pleasure of being reunited with things that have been sitting in front of you for the last however many years.

I managed to recycle/take to the charity shop/chuck out a good chunk of my stuff prior to this move, but even that was barely enough to mitigate the horror of yoinking my worldly possessions to a van and driving it several times across most of the country.

Washing your prized vestments within the confines of your own home is an underrated luxury. Not underrated by me of course, now that I’ve heaved – hoven? – the washing machine in and out and through before meticulously hooking it back up to pipe work I don’t understand.

I’m not a handy man to have around, and now I live in perpetual fear of something popping off while my pants are in a flat spin and a tidal wave of lightly scummy water scudding across the kitchen tiles. I barely have the wherewithal to even half arse a domestic task, so it’s my wife who knows where all the screwdrivers are kept. She has an axe now, which worries me slightly.

What is quite refreshing is knowing the house that you’re going to see out your days in, however numerous they may be. After this move significantly fewer than I might otherwise have imagined, because I gather that I’m in no fit state to be lifting things and taking them places.

Do I want to die here? I can categorically say that this was not on my top 10 places to kick the bucket (mental note: write list of places I wouldn’t mind dying in. That fancy chip shop in Cromer?), but if it happens it happens. I can’t really be bothered to go anywhere else now.

A freewheeling, experimental morning

I get very wistful for the good old days of blogging (2005) back when things had a freewheeling, experimental air. It was confessional (as long as you had a secret identity), hilarious (as long as you were funny) but usually compelling (as long as you had work you were avoiding). I keep thinking that I need to go retro on here, but the problem is that I don’t often do anything interesting.

Take today for example. I woke up at 6:40am to a screaming cat (she’s not supposed to start screaming until 7am, which she well knows), but managed to pretend to be asleep long enough for my wife to get up and feed her. I successfully convince myself that I’m helping both of them as I do so.

I have a coffee, followed by a shower, followed by another coffee. This will be all the coffee that I drink today as I try to manage my consumption of coffee. I could probably handle a third cup, but the danger is that I wouldn’t be able to stop, until I resembled nothing more than a jittering ball of static in the corner of the room.

I try and do some work that I need to do, that I should have done some weeks ago, but have cheerfully been able to set aside knowing that the deadline was ages away, until one day I realised that it was no longer ages away. It is nearly 1pm, I shall shortly have lunch.

Two tyred to function

I had some work done on the car the other day. Because I drive cars and write about them for a living people seem to think that I'll know anything about them, but that's simply not the case. 'This car runs on fairy dust' seems about as plausible as any other explanation of the internal combustion engine that my teeny brain can take in. So obviously I can't mention my profession in any form. 

In so many ways I'm perfectly secure in my masculinity – which is probably why I feel comfortable enough writing a blog post that lays bare my utter mechanical ineptitude – but I'm greatly intimidated by a middle aged man in an oil-stained onesie who sputters forth a language I'm supposed to understand and am apparently deficient for being baffled by. 

Which is all to explain why I took my electric Hyundai in to get its wheels rebalanced (they were all pointing in different directions, I'm told. Didn’t really have a problem with it, let them live their truth) and ended up paying for two front tyres on a Ford Fiesta.

Did I go in and challenge the four men standing menacingly behind the counter? I did not. It seemed more or less what I expected to pay, and to be honest I hope that whoever got their tyres paid for had a lovely day. And that I didn't blunder into a scam. As far as I can tell the wheels are all pointing in the same direction now. 

A bug’s life

I had a lovely time at the beginning of the month driving with Mrs Burnett to see friends in Northern Ireland, a roadtrip across three different islands and three different countries, with a 3.5 hour run at the front of a large boat where I chugged as many cans of Pepsi as my poor stomach could take because I'd paid extra for lounge access. I now know exactly what a foam fire extinguisher feels like. 

We drove, and the amazing thing when we got to our destination in Northern Ireland was not that it was sunny (though it was indeed amazing – our third visit and the first time we've seen shadows) but that the car was absolutely festooned with dead bugs. The windscreen was so badly smeared it could have been a bathroom window, the numberplate riddled with more legs and wings than a south London chicken shop. 

It made me realise that it's been a goodly amount of time since I've seen such a massacre of invertebrates on the car, at least in the UK. There are some interesting possible reasons behind this – a warmer, wetter spring following a drier winter has meant that bug have managed to survive long enough to be thwacked in the face with a Hyundai. Or perhaps the biodiversity of Northern Ireland is simply better – it's a lush green agricultural land, with cows and sheep aplenty. Or it could be that the insects round those parts are exceptionally stupid and are attracted to fast moving, brightly coloured hunks of metal. 

Coincidentally, I saw on my return to pastures less green but still more green than most other places that the annual dead insect count is set to take place shortly. Basically there’s an organisation that gets motorists to drive around for a bit and then stick a thing on their numberplates to see how boned we are on the climate. Fingers crossed people, but I think it’s looking good. But not if you’re a fly. 

Sun’s out, but let’s give peace a chance

The weather has been quite nice over the last week or two, which is lovely, but I did hear someone roll out a distinctly bleached out phrase the other day. ‘Sun’s out, guns out’, they said. That wasn’t the only thing they said, would have been totally weird if they just walked off after four words, but I didn’t transcribe the rest of the conversation.

It’s a strange thing to say, though. Now actually I can well understand that a period of nice weather is particular desirable in a military situation, you don’t want to be getting bogged down on the battlefield, do you. But at the same time, do you want to be giving away tactics on such a sensitive subject? Hardly going to be taking the enemy by surprise when your strategy is available to order from Etsy stitched on a cap.

I do gather that this person could also have been taken to understand that they intended to air their upper arms during this period of sunny weather, but looking at them I really don’t think it’s anything they would have meant to brag about. Unless direct sunlight is essential to the muscle increasing process, in which case they should have at it.

Personally I don’t like to put too much pressure on the weather – ‘sun’s out, I’ll think about going out myself, but who knows whether it’ll actually last until I’ve finished work?’. Doesn’t look quite the same on a hat, but it’s more realistic.

Truth be told, if the sun’s out I’ll probably be doing much the same as I would have been doing if it was cold and wet, I’ll just be going about it in a slightly happier fashion. Which reminds me, I need to pop to the supermarket. Won’t need the umbrella today thank goodness. 

I’m introducing some tariffs

I’m not entirely sure how all of this works, but I’ve decided to announce tariffs on everything people give me. Again, not sure how it works but I expect I’ll get very rich very quickly and it’ll serve them right for trying to give me stuff.

It’s worked already on a coffee I ordered this morning, where I made them give me two sugars. I don’t actually take any sugars in my coffee, but it’s the principle of the thing.

A principle I’m not too sure what it actually is, but it feels like it could be an important principle. And don’t try to argue with me on this, because I’ll make you pay tariffs on the argument. That’ll be 20 percent extra right there. Boom, no more arguments.

It’s really clever stuff actually, I don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of it before, it’s not like there are tariffs on coming up with ideas. 

Nostalgia isn’t what we used to be

So WH Smith, purveyor of an increasingly short shelf of magazines and periodicals along with a load of cap that you don’t really want has bitten the dust. It remains profitable, insists its former owner, it’s just not a profit it wants to have to work so hard to make.

And cue much hand wringing today in the press about the disappearance of WH Smith newsagents from the high street and what a sad day it is for us all. It's going the way of Woolworths, Rumbelows, C&A, Dixons, BHS. Indeed, when I was young I got all of my back to school essentials in long dead establishments – shoes from Dolcis, coat from Allders, glasses from Dollond and Aitchison. 

I will say that I hadn't even realised that Topshop, Thorntons and Debenhams weren't around anymore either. Which brings me to my main thought – if a name disappears on the high street and there's no one there to see it... You see, we're told we need to be sad about these things dying off, and it plays into a deep set nostalgia that things used to be better.

But if we really cared about the like of WH Smith, Woolworths and Blockbuster we'd actually have gone to shop there, wouldn't we? It's a dog eat dog world out there, and there's always someone trying to sell you a better dog for the job. 

Everyone’s talking about it

There are very few people around saying that Jaguar’s rebranding campaign was actually any good, instead we’ve had this weird backstop of ‘well at least you’re talking about it’. I never believed that even when Eastenders said it. If everyone talking about it was the goal, it would have been cheaper to send the board of directors streaking down Whitehall, even with train tickets the way they are.

The strangest thing about the whole deal is not the generic one size fits all visuals, or misreading the room (the world is miserable, and here we have a luxury carmaker reminding us that everything is awesome as long as you have plenty of disposal income), it’s the fact that the one job of a car company is to sell cars.

Everyone is talking about it, sure, but to what end? If we learn anything from Jaguar’s rebranding it’s that its products have been rubbish and the whole company has been phoning it in for the last few years. But just wait until you see what we’re working on… in two years.

Sure, Jaguar was a bit fusty and out of touch, but now it’s a carmaker without cars, a letterhead and a blank social media profile. Might as well go the whole hog, get a PO box address and move back into its childhood bedroom. No cars and no clue, but everyone is talking about it…

My body makes a funny sound

I’ve got to the devastating age when you have to start paying a bit closer attention to the weird sounds your body is making. No, not those ones. Like a few years ago when we were in Strasbourg for a few days and I was stretching my arms out behind me in a languid fashion and heard a rssssht sound like velcro come from somewhere near my right ear.

It wasn’t immediately painful, I wasn’t tempted to roll around on the floor or anything, but any sudden movement from my arm would result in a temporarily demobilising pain. Turned out I’d torn my RSJ. No, that’s the living room one. The shoulder one is the rotator cuff. Still hurts a little occasionally, even now, but I suppose I have to accept that I am simply getting old and need to warm up thoroughly before I stretch in the morning.

Just now I sort of puffed my cheeks out as if I was blowing up a balloon and there was a fizzing sound in the back of my jaw, like I’d tipped over a bottle of lemonade by accident. Random bodily function or minor life impacting ailment? Well, that’s the fun these days, when so many exciting alternatives are the preserve of much younger folk than me.