DZP #63 Complete - Outdoor Picnic

The beautiful Stanmer Park just outside of Brighton was host to a very relaxed picnic in late April. Great views, even better company and a nice chance to get some pretty shots of the surrounding greenery and village. If you get the chance, it's most definitely worth the visit.

Ladies That Lunch

View From Picnic Spot

Stanmer House

Church Tower in Stanmer Village

View On The Walk Back

DZP #84 Complete - Finish the Nursery

With the small person on the way, we actually had a nursery set aside in our smallest room and all ready to go ... but then we realised the error of our ways when it came to the size of the cot (yet to arrive at that point). I don't know about anyone else, but somehow in my mind a child's cot was not as big as they are in reality! It doubles as a bed when they get a little older, so yes it should've clicked that it wouldn't be three foot long and two foot tall, but it doesn't really hit home until you've carried the sodding thing up the stairs and assembled it.

So we took over the other bedroom instead and muggins moved all the bits through with assistance ("no, not there ... THERE") from his amazing and heavily pregnant wife and the visiting father ("well, while you're here ...") so it wasn't the back-breaking prospect it initially could have been.

Nappy changing station was configured with a soft bulb uplighter next to it for non-invasive 4am nappy changes so she's not subjected to super bright light when the brain is trying to make her sleep. We did realise we were lacking a clothes basket and bin, which should have been there from the beginning but have now been catered for. That's not much consolation when you're standing there at midnight holding a nappy full of leaky matter and realise there's nowhere to put it :)

The room was painted up in reasonably netural colours, as if we have a second little person then this means we're not potentially putting a small boy in a room filled with pinkery; more importantly we don't need to repaint. Our daughter's collection of toys and clothes will add enough feminine frappy to keep her ladylike in the coming years so we have no fear on that score.

Still, it was nice to finally get the room finished off, and reuse my old office furniture cunningly disguised with bunny rabbit stickers and repurposed as the official Guardian of the Onesies. Yes that's right, I know all the cool parental lingo now.

DZP #70 - Whole Week Without Complaining

The full task I assigned myself was "Go a whole week without a single audible or written complaint" because when something rubbish happens you can't actually stop your brain from having a good gripe, but you can stop it before it leaves the brain.

I failed this task three times before completing it successfully. If I got to a point midway through a week where I bitched, moaned or whined about something then it was shelved until the next Monday to start all over again as punishment for lapsing.

In a similar fashion to the "say yes" week undertaken a while back, you really begin to consider exactly what you say and how you say it. By default I'm a reasonably cynical chap with a well-earned reputation for sarcasm, so when you say something pleasant and upbeat it is rarely taken at face value. Easily the trickiest job out of the whole lot to-date and outwardly I was a ray of fucking sunshine for seven straight days, despite on occasion inwarding seething :) Hey, it's a start ...

DZP #83 Complete - Buy A Teddy Bear For Our Daughter

Deary me, I'm very much behind on my regular updates due to fatherhood creeping up on me. Normal service in the process of resuming.

I believe it's the duty of every Dad to buy their children a teddy bear. This comes from my own childhood, but your bear is an important part of the formative years and provides you a constant companion who is mostly resistant to whatever shennanigans you wish to indulge in, and is always a willing accomplice to your adventures.

With that in mind, I wanted a bear who was fluffy enough to be suitable for a girl but rugged enough to survive the journey; so all hail the Lizzy by Steiff who will undoubtedly be piebald before five but is machine washable, super cuddly and loved by all.

Post Mortem

So that's our involvement rounded off for another year and now I can sit back and actually enjoy the football from this point on, knowing that the best teams are winning games and progressing and cheering on enjoyable football. It wouldn't be right to let us bow out without a post on the subject though.

Yes the strike from Lampard definitely crossed the line, but wasn't given. Would it have swayed the result in our favour? We'll never know. I'm sure momentum would have passed back to England, whereas Germany could take heart from it not being given. That doesn't excuse us from the fact we were two goals down and conceded two more from a well organised, creative team who were quick on the break, wanted it more than we did and were prepared to work for it to get the win.

Since the finish of that game I've heard a number of arguments along the lines of "we're a better team" but it doesn't hold true. We're not a better team! The better team tends to progress through these events, and on a regular basis.

We were beaten by the better team.

Let us take a moment to review the facts. There is a percentage of the rabid fan base that likes to dredge up the England World Cup win in 1966 where we put one star above our national badge, coupled with the usual chants of "two World Wars and one World Cup" but that's more than a little dull now especially when you have the statistics at your fingertips. Since 1966 Germany have contested six World Cup finals, winning two and being runners up in four (obviously); go look at the statistics if this doesn't sound right to you. In fact while we're on the subject, at European Championship level they've won that three times and been runners up three times too (stats here). That's twelve major finals contested, with five victories.

Since 1966, England have appeared in two competitive semi-finals.

France, Germany, Holland and Italy all get to finals with alarming regularity and now Spain are getting in the act too, deservedly so. Hell ... even Belgium have a better record of reaching competitive finals than we do! All these indicate point to the fact we are not a good team. But why?

We have some fantastic players and those of us who follow a Premiership team get to watch them on a regular basis, and in a number of cases they play at Champions League level so we know they're good. We know there's a collection of quick, athletic and good footballers there ... it just seems to be taking this squad and moulding it into a team where we struggle.

I don't understand it myself, but I do know we played people out of position, and with the benefit of hindsight most likely played the wrong formation too. The biggest surprise to most people appears to have been the lack of impact made by Rooney on the tournament when other big stars took the opportunity to shine, but if you don't give your strikers the ball in space then they become ineffective. Yet again our problem was in the midfield.

We had a static midfield with no attacking verve and, in Gerrard, a left midfielder who looked bemused to be there and wandered infield whenever he could to try and get things going. Sadly this left enormous gaps for full-backs and wingers to exploit and it was only the genuine excellence and boundless energy of Ashley Cole (our best player of the tournament) that meant we weren't overrun every five minutes. Barry was well off the pace and pulled out of position on a regular basis, with only Lampard offering anything in the middle of the park but lacking in options to play it forward.

It's a damning indictment when one of the girls in the pub with us who has almost no  interest in football commented that surely Rooney shouldn't be playing in our half of the pitch, and why wasn't he in their half. That was the story of all four games, where Rooney dropped deeper and deeper to look for the ball because it wasn't being played up field. During the Germany game there were several occasions when two defenders (Terry and Cole) were the furthest forward players, and that's not right.

Where was the quick running on the wings, or the darting run by the centre forward to give them options to open up the opposition? Trick question, as our strikers had become part of a makeshift six man midfield looking to get the ball back from the other team. It was like watching the rearguard actions from Liverpool during their 2000-2001 European fixtures when we scored a goal then desperately hung on for a win, just ... without the goals to win it this time round.

We need genuine change to either accomodate the players we have in a 4-4-1-1 as below, or loose 4-5-1 formation to provide a front man with plenty of potential running from midfield in support ...

Hart

Johnson, Ferdinand, Terry, A Cole

A Johnson, Lampard, Barry, J Cole

Gerrard

Rooney

... or we revert to a 4-4-2 and take the brave step of culling our midfield, and instead of the age old problem of attempting to fit in all these great players, we drop them and use players best suited for the positions. Spain have a wealth of excellence in their midfield, but have avoided the temptation to put them all on the pitch at the same time because it wouldn't work. We would benefit from learning this ourselves and adapting to do the same.

We're not very good at losing, and frankly our attitude is shitty but actually, we're worse at winning. It tends to inflate opinion of ourselves into something unbearable, then when we do inevitably lose the recrimination begins immediately and takes the form of a witch hunt. After qualifying for the World Cup with two games in hand, we were talking about giving Capello the keys to the country let alone a town, knighting him and possibly naming our firstborn after him ... now the media (and likely a large number of supporters) want him out the door or possibly nailed up on a couple of pieces of wood.

Who on earth would want the England job under these circumstances?  Personally I hope we retain Capello, and that he wants to stay but things do need to change. In the meantime I'm off to enjoy the rest of the tournament without the unpleasant burden of unrealistic expectation on our national team's shoulders.

Hall Bicep Hut

With antenatal classes behind us, we're now into the final stages of preparation and then the near endless waiting period before the little person deigns to arrive. One thing that has surprised me during the experience to-date is how awesome the National Health Service is. Yes that's right, the NHS.

My experiences with them due to injury have been pretty stellar and I've mentioned them before, but that's been mostly a reactive environment where I do something stupid and then lovely people fix me*. This has been different, as they've laid out a clear path of what should happen, what could go wrong and what they'll do if that occurs. Most of what they're telling us will (fingers crossed) not occur, but there's a great degree of comfort knowing they're ready for all eventualities and we're very fortunate to be in this position.

We've been given a massive amount of support by the local GPs and hospital even despite having no hiccups to speak of during the last eight months. Occasionally we all bitch and moan about the amount of money that leaves our pockets and goes into the Government, but when you see it in action you gain an appreciation for the effort that goes in to making all this work.

There. I promise I'll be back to being rude and unpleasant in my next post.

* As in repair me, not neuter me

For The Greater Good

I realise that when you're head of a Union, the first duty you have is to your (paying) members and pushing their rights and civil liberties as a priority. But out of interest is there actually a requirement on the job application for said individual to be a pretentious, unrelenting, small-minded, insincere sound bite-loving tool? In recent media debates and discussions I've been looking at what appears to be a set of bodies cut from very much the same cloth representing the interests of their poor, dues-paying members. Actually, probably closer to a low quality ten-for-a-quid flannel than a higher quality luxury branded Egyptian cotton cloth.

While I'm all in favour of people getting guarantees of crazy things like job security and a salaried remuneration that ties in with their (often underappreciated) jobs, surely they could perhaps invest in a smug, gameshow-host style individual to achieve the same aims and perhaps get the extra bonus of having the unwashed masses on their side too? Instead of us sitting there cursing them for what appear to be union actions with no real benefit for anyone involved in the whole sorry saga.

Run Forest!

I've started running at the gym. Yes, another fat lad on a treadmill! Why? I've put it on my Day Zero list one of the items there is to be able to run 5km without stopping. To add to that, without slowing to a walk or anything below what would constitute a brisk jogging pace. To be honest, this feels like one of the least achievable items on my list just after "building a house made of butter in the Gobi desert", as it's completely alien to me and with my rubbish tendon this was something I put on there to force myself into completing for exactly these reasons.

It's been a pleasant surprise to see my stamina improve, my average time dropping and no pain associated with the running at the gym. To make it a more palatable experience for a non-runner like myself, I've been setting milestones to this point to help me along this far;

• Reach one kilometre in distance
• Dropping that time down from 11 minutes(!) to something more respectable
• Reach two kilometres in distance
• Drop that time down from 17 minutes(!) to something more respectable

You'll notice the time for 2km is considerably less than twice my original 1km time. At the time of writing I'm down to seven minutes flat for 1km and while it won't be setting the world alight or cementing my place in Team GB for 2012 it feels pretty good. That does mean my time on the second kilometre is one and a half times slower than the first, but y'know that's progress and secretly (or not so secretly now) there's genuine delight to be considering knocking off another three minutes from my current time over the 2km distance.

I must confess it's been far easier to push the body into doing this than I expected, and while there is a little deflation when I see the guy on the machine next to me jogging at 12km/h on an incline I wouldn't want to drive up, this is progress! In six weeks, and a cautionary note sounding in the back of my head to be gentle with my tendon lest it rupture again, to get this far does feel pretty good.

HAL and Back

I've noticed a disturbing trend in recent sales calls coming through to me at work, where they feel repeated use of my first name during the call  is a good thing. This has happened to me at exhibitions too, and is a fascinating study at watching normal people following a script. From looking at their faces I even suspect they don't see anything wrong with doing this either, which is all the more curious.

There's probably an instruction manual out there which states that by repeating the potential client's name in conversation helps to reinforce the bond between us, putting us on a more relaxed and informal basis where we'll be entranced with your friendly nature and be keen to acquiesce to your wishes ... but actually nothing could be further from the truth.

Unlike you, I began this chat knowing my name is Dave and thankfully don't need to hear it ten times in your three minute sales pitch. It feels patronising, it's most definitely an unnecessary and unwelcome addition to the pitch ... and if anything will make me less likely to want to progress further. I'm alright with there being a pitch in the first place, because it's necessary to promote the product and provide all the information necessary to make an informed decision in a short period of time, but let us modify how you're approaching this.

Drop the name reptition, focus on your product pitch, hone your technique and come back to me when you're ready to converse how everyone does in the real world.

Baby Steps

I'll be to parenting what I was to ex-smokers, breaking the mold and avoiding turning into that most pretentious of creatures; the one who thinks no-one else has been in their situation. The blinkered martyr determined to let you know their suffering is greater than yours. What sparked this you say? My new favourite anger-vein-invoking conversation on the subject of parenthood is;

Person: "Have you got everything ready?"
Me: "Well, we've prepared as best we can for wha ..."
Person: "HAHAHA YOU HAVEN'T A CLUE WHAT'S COMING"

usually followed by ...

Person: "Just you wait"

Well obviously I'll have to wait, you lemon. Thankfully this conversation is usually held with people who aren't in my social circle for regular communication, or indeed are simply drive-by parents shooting me with bullets of stupidity from their Ignorance Cannon.

This is where my patience, meticulous planning skills, and being calm and relaxed come into play because there's huge swathes of things yet to be apparent to me regarding parenthood and children in general. That's okay, I'm expecting it to be that way, it's all part of the learning curve and we're cool with that. What I'm not cool with is people asking me trick questions then believing it's hilarious that these events haven't unfolded on me yet.

That is the whole point of parenthood for the first time, no-one giving you all the advice in the world can ever truly prepare you for what is to come. It's a life changing event and anyone who embarks on the journey without realising that needs shaking warmly by the neck until the truth sinks in. No-one knows what will unfold, and all we can hope for is a smooth healthy ride along the way and then laugh later once we wrap our heads around everything that happens.

Nappies? Check. Nursery? Check. Baby clothing for the first six months in different sizes? Check. Baby on the way? Check. With the basics in hand, if you'd like to offer sage advice about what we may have missed or should prepare for then it's greatly appreciated and will be lovingly received. If you're in it for some weird form of gloating because you reproduced before we did, then please dispense your wisdom elsewhere.