Broken cats, Nuclear Pussies, and Old Laing Signs.

This is going to be a confusing entry, part review of the year and part review of the days since my last entry, which incidentally was a week ago.

The journey home from my parents was okay, certainly less traumatic than the journey up there. At times however it was apparent that my car was not 100% happy. This went on to become a theme for the weekend. On Friday, me and my dearest went to Coventry shopping. Crazy, but true. I would imagine that it was no more or less mad than any other town centre on the first day of the sales. However, I came back with two fantastic finds.

The title Target: 2006 probably means very little to most people, but for me I guess it was the original beginning of my love of comics. It was a story in the UK Transformers comic that tied in with Transformers: The Movie. And I loved it. I never actually had any Transformers of my own, and it was my brother that got the comic, not me. I was just a bit too old at the time, in theory. But the stories were real stories, and the characters were real characters. The writers managed to make it seem like more than just another Toy Tie-In. Then my brother lent all of his Transformers comics to his then best mate. Before he got them back, they had a massive bust-up, and said comics were never seen again. On Friday in Coventry, I found and bought the collected edition of Target: 2006 and the next major story that followed, Fallen Angel. Reading Fallen Angel again was very odd. As I was reading I started remembering reading it the first time, and how sucked in to the storyline I had been, and how much the way it was written made me actually care about what happened. I found myself sucked in and overwhelmed by it again, which made me feel more than a little jittery afterwards. I also bought 4 of the 6 Bond films on DVD that I require to complete my collection. A snip at �7.99 each :-)

Saturday we travelled to Bedford, where we were meeting my parents, my brother and his fianc�e for a meal. This was when the car started making its unhappiness felt in earnest. Loss of power. On the motorway the fastest the car could manage was 70mph, and it accelerated like a shopmobility cart. By the time we arrived in Bedford I was very concerned, which for me put a damper on the whole occasion. After we'd eaten, my brother and I went out and checked the air-filter, and found no obvious problems. After a little wander around the town, we set off back for home, with my parents following behind us. Top speed was 60mph as we left Bedford, dropping to 55mph as we progressed along the motorway. At the first services I pulled in and called VW Breakdown, on the basis that even if the car wasn't going to completely breakdown if we carried on, I probably was.

I could go into how long we waited, and the people-watching the 4 of us engaged in as we waited for the breakdown to turn up, but I can't be arsed. The end result was that it became evident that the Catalytic Converter was fucked. So my dear car had to be relayed home. Over the subsequent days it became apparent that since I was only happy with VW themselves doing the work, I was going to have to pay dearly. �350 dearly, to be precise. And they're unlikely to be able to furnish me with a car in the meantime. How fucking useless is that, eh? I have to commute 20 miles to work. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. (This was days ago for me, and I'm over swearing about it, but I figured you wouldn't necessarily get how fucked up the car situation is without it).

And then on towards the New Year. We spent the New Year period at Alison's parents, joined also by sister + sister's boyfriend. Going by previous experiences of a similar nature I was expecting to find it difficult. It was in places, but for the most part wasn't. For a start I got a funky remote controlled Mini Cooper as my chrissy present from Alison's parents, and secondly Alison got the game Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers from her sister. Carcassonne rocks. It's like a cross between dominoes and, say, a simple version of Settlers. It also involves simple strategy, and cold viciousness like you wouldn't believe. Needless to say, we spent most of the evenings playing it.

Our New Years Eve involved a major walk on Cannock Chase, followed by many games of Carcassonne. In the run up to midnight we stopped playing and put Jools Holland on the TV. Alison and I danced in the few minutes before midnight while Jools and his band were jamming. There were the usual New Years toasts and hugs and kisses and singing Auld Lang Syne, and then I went on to the most foolhardy venture of the night. I tried to phone Anne. And Sham. Problem 1. Couldn't phone Sham because calls to Ireland are apparently barred on my mobile contract. Problem 2. Mobile phone networks. I don't know what other countries are like, but in Britain the mobile networks are totally overloaded in the first hours of the New Year. It wasn't quite as bad as previous years, in so much as I was actually able to send texts most of the time, but it took me 45 minutes of sporadic trying to get through to Anne. Network Busy and the beep! beep! beep! that meant the phone couldn't even connect to the network in the first place became mantras for the day. Even now when texting people I'm getting Message Not Sent, Try Again Later. Why? Sort it out, phone networks.

Oh yeah, and I promised a review of the year. I'll be brief. In 2002 I:

• turned thirty.
• got called a homophobe by a total asshole.
• discovered that someone I thought was just a friend was actually a fantastic friend.
• started keeping this journal.
• finished a 115,000 word fanfic novel.
• bought a house.
• wrote over 50,000 words of a novel inside a month.
• wired a kitchen.
• had no days off sick due to stress, anxiety or depression.

PS: Nuclear Pussies was just an attention grabber.