» Bad Smells

Rotten rubbish bin
A few years ago, I returned from a two-week summer holiday to find my back garden looking like the setting for a midget version of I'm A Nonentity Get Me Out Of Here. Time to drag the lawnmower out of the shed then.

A few minutes later I was working up a sweat which must have left me smelling pretty rank, before unhitching the mower's grass box and setting off up the garden to empty it into the brown bin, that chocolate-hued two-wheeled device for kitchen and garden rubbish we had recently been given by the council. What I didn't know is a) some old fruit and vegetable remnants had been left in the bottom of the bin while we had been away on holiday and b) said two weeks had been unseasonably hot for an English summer. Said food waste had therefore turned to unrecognisable sludge.

As I opened the bin to empty the grass in, the most extreme incredible stench hit my nostrils. It was as if Satan himself had given himself an enema, then re-ingested the contents and shat them back out again. Baby poo covering a hundred rotting corpses could not have smelled worse.

I dropped the grass box and almost keeled over, before spewing up the (thankfully small amount of) food in my gut at the time onto the patio. A quick spray with the hosepipe got rid of that, and I then emptied what grass I hadn't spilled everywhere into a plastic bin sack. I don't recall who eventually dealt with the putrid horrors in the brown bin - someone else's problem of course.
(Fri 17th Jan 2014, 17:40, More)

» Creepy!

Remember the earthquake that was centred on the West Midlands a few years ago?
When that happened I was fucking creeped out. I was sat in my room reading, heard a rumbling sound (at first I thought it was a low aircraft) and then my house seemed to rock back and forth for a few seconds. Properly shit me up and it was about half an hour before I dared even move.

The stranger thing was, when I woke up the next morning I thought I had dreamed the whole thing, and it was only when I turned on the car radio as I went to college that I realised it had been real.

And that was only a relatively minor earth tremor. Fuck knows what I would have been like if I'd been living in Japan in the last few weeks.
(Fri 8th Apr 2011, 16:55, More)

» Starting something you couldn't finish

A model railway
When I was little, fuelled by family trips to steam railways and repeats of Thomas the Tank Engine, I decided I wanted a model railway. Me and my dad started out on the project, building a board to lay it all out on and trying to find a home for it, while I thought of how I was going to build and run my own countryside landscape and railway station from my bedroom.

We got as far as nailing an oval of track to the board, and buying one or two model trains and a couple of buildings. Last year, the board was finally removed from its home (leaning up against the wall in the garage) and thrown away after approximately 17 years in the same position. The trains and buildings are, as far as I know, still in the shed somewhere.

Apologies for shitness.
(Thu 24th Jun 2010, 21:38, More)

» Irrational Hatred

Nissan Micras
I think this one counts as irrational.

Now, I appreciate that the Nissan Micra is a popular car and there are probably those who enjoy driving them, but those who drive them seem incapable of approaching anywhere near the speed limit for the given road and instead will dawdle along and hold up everything behind them. See a queue of traffic ahead of you on a major single-carriageway road where it's hard to overtake? 99% of the time, it would seem, there will be a Micra bimbling along at 37mph at the front of it.

(My hatred is fuelled further by the fact I had one as a hire car several years ago, and it was the most godwaful piece of crap I have ever had the misfortune to drive.)
(Thu 31st Mar 2011, 19:09, More)