its been a long, long time!

After a long time without blogging i have finally bitten the bullet and decided to write again.

I should re-cap what has happened over the last few years:-

The children are getting bigger, hungrier and more expensive than ever, mrs g also...

The farm amazingly is still solvent - despite my best efforts (and mrs g's)

I see in my last blog that i was still working in the graintrade. Unfortunatly work was hard so i quit...

We have more ducks than ever, and will soon have even more as another shed is being built at the moment. that is, if it finally ever stops raining!

despite the economy, duck related construction work, and their ability to annoy me, the horses and horsey people are still here. we have our usual love/hate relationship. I love them all - they hate me, pretty much unanimously i think at the moment due to mud caused by duck construction, noise caused by duck construction, traffic caused by.. i think you have guessed by now!

We have expanded into private storage and workshop units. i quite enjoy this side of the business as it involves very little effort or management. two exceptionally good traits for any business i am involved in. I am not sure if my watching constant re runs of 'Storage Wars' and 'Auction Kings' is a good idea though. these television programmes (for the bennefit of my non TV obsessed readers) involves people who buy abandoned or bankrupt private storage units at auction and then they root around in the debris and oddments of the peoples lives stored therin, looking for valuables to sell on. it makes me secretly hope if anyone abandons one of our units and i have to go through it, that i will be finding the occassional unknown Piccaso or Rembrandt stuffed into the back of a shipping container, which would help my relationship with my bankmanager greatly! - not to mention my relationship with Mrs G. it would be my luck that i would just find a pile of dodgy asbestos and some really poor quality 70's porn - not all bad i hear you say, but its bound to be Betamax not VHS!


   

S & M on valentines!

Mrs G went all out this year and bought me a M & S special offer three course 'dine in' meal for our romantic valentines meal albeit a day early.

Being slightly dyslexic I got rather excited when I saw her Facebook status while i was at work on friday, I did not know what a S & M dinner was, something kinky with whips and rubber outfits I thought! however, I was not disappointed even though my treat did not involve any nudity, which in hindsight may have put Mrs G off her supper. As a general rule in life the only nuts I enjoy being whipped are walnuts.

Somehow I managed to put my back out Friday being driven round a rather rough farm next to Luton airport and I have been in stunning pain ever since. a trip to Sainsburys Saturday morning yielded every pack of 'stick on' heat pads they had. The pack recommendation states 'one pad to be applied to the painfull area for a maximum of ten hours in any 24 hour period' I am on my sixth today and have started applying them two at a time, I don't think anyone has ever died of overdosing on heat pads. I also got a large tube of deep heat and some Neurofen. a friend of mine uses deep heat when on long fishing trips as he suffers from a bad back when camping, though the whimper of pain I heard coming out of his bivvy (tent) one night suggested that traces of deep heat on your hands while reading a Playboy magazine is not a pleasant combination. Though he did not complain of the cold much after that.

A bad back is not condusive to a romantic valentines evening though after a bottle of fizzy pink Carver, a half bottle of rose we found in the back of the fridge and a couple extra heat pads on my back, the pain had been sufficiently aneasitised to allow me to have a romantic evening with Mrs G. I cant help wondering though what the S & M dinner would have been like....

back after a break!

It has been commented to me today that since I joined the grain buying trade four months ago, the market has completely collapsed, with the average value of wheat dropping by around £10/tonne.

While I don't think the market collapse can be laid entirely at my door, I think the general opinion is that I am actually a rubbish farm trader. my ability to persuade farmers to part with there hard grown crops is almost as good as my ability to grow Tilapia fish, or generate a satisfied livery customer (or wife, Mrs G is screaming at me). However I am learning. I know far more about the grain business than I did six months ago, which is not surprising as I knew next to nothing back then, now I know next to, next to nothing which is an improvement I suppose.

I have been doing some public speaking, Nuffield talks and the like. I thought in order to prepare for the talks I would do some warm-up presentations, so I went down to the local old peoples home to practise my jokes and improve my technique. my first talk to the old biddys went quite well, admittedly nobody laughed, but they all pissed themselves anyway!

(pause for laughter)

they dont get any better than that do they?!

Mrs G and I took the kids to Centreparcs for a long weekend a couple of weeks ago. four days of fun, laughter and quality time with the kids.

Centreparcs offers a massive variety of activities swimming, bowling, quad biking and all sorts of exciting stuff. so what do my kids want to do? get out in the fresh air and enjoy the thrilling sports? no. they opt to stay in the villa and chuck up all weekend. that's life eh!

So then, who did kill Archie Mitchel? my money is on young Dottie Cotton, just a hunch. Hopefully a better hunch than my deciding not to sell my wheat at £105/tonne three months ago thinking the price was bound to go up....

Waste

Am I the only one who thinks that Sam Mitchell on Eastenders is a really weird looking women? I don't know why people keep going on about how beautiful she is, to be fair there are much better looking women on Eastenders. Although the Totty standard has dropped in recent years. Gone are the halycon days of Dawn Swan. Tanya Branning is the only remaining eye candy worth noting (I don't count the Mitchell sisters - they are not the Duckman type) and then Tanya is only really a 7/10 on the best of days. But I am jaded, ever since 'Dee' (they never found the body - how did that work, she had a fine pair of built in life preservers?) drowned in neighbours, no other soap opera babe has been able to compare. I live in hope.

I visited a farm today that was storing about 3,ooo tonnes of rice. it was kept in one big heap on a shed floor. this was then being processed and will end up in Uncle Bens and supermarket own boxes all over the country. It was very impressive. But I couldn't help thinking that it could feed a lot of people in the third world for a long time, but sadly a lot of it would end up being chucked in a bin. Do you realise that we waste about 40% of the food we produce in this country? when you see a pile of food big enough to literally ski down it puts things in perspective.

November 15th

Have you ever heard the saying that its the second mouse that gets the cheese? well, I have been the first mouse several times. Obviously I am speaking metaphorically, otherwise I would be dead. Maybe I didn't learn my lesson well enough first time? or am I just thick? - maybe its a combination of the two? answers on a postcard please!

Those of you that know me will know that I have been rather unfortunate with my last two business ventures, and that since then my confidence has taken rather a big hit. However I am now starting to feel my self belief returning just a tinsy bit, the clouds of self pity are starting to clear.

But this time I will not be that first mouse. On a side note, when I was trying to catch a particularly noisy mouse I used mars bars as bait after several weeks using cheese, they seemed to prefer that. Then I discovered that they like peanut butter just as much which was good as I ate the mars bars. Frankly its a bit stereotypical that mice like cheese, this is the naughties and mice have more metropolitan tastes now.

I guess you are wondering what my idea is? keep reading my blog to find out!

Im Pooped!

I am as knacked as a small worm at coffee break time after a busy morning dodging the early bird.

In the last four weeks I have worked an average 75 hour week, with the exception of two days at the Nuffield conference where I had the undescribable pleasure of a 7.30 lay in. However even this minor relief was stolen from me by late nights in the bar and 4 hour drive either way!

But I cannot complain, there are many people worse off than me. I still have my looks, wit and charm. Actually, putting it like that I am in the proverbial!

I am looking forward to the weekend. Its my eldest sons (Master G) 8th birthday on Sunday. Wow. It is amazing how the time has flown by! a couple of weeks after that it is Mrs G's and i's 9th wedding anniversary. Ideas for romantic surprises will be gratefully received. don't let your suggestions be hampered by thoughts of the credit crunch. Just remember that I am a cheapskate!

Now I have completed my Nuffield Scholarship report and presentation I am a little unsure where to go from here. How do I develop this further? I don't want to put the report in the drawer and forget about it. maybe a sideline in agricultural motivational speaking?

Top class public speaker available for hire!

Last weekend was the Nuffield Winter Conference, where all the brightest and best young minds in British agriculture go to present there hard written reports for 'peer review'. The rest of us went for the beer and to catch up with our mates!

Two full days of sitting listening to other scholar reports gave time for my nerves to build up to a level similar to a fifteen year old boy on a promise. I had decided to approach the event with a less technical, lighter presentation, as I thought most people would be out to impress with deeply intelligent, well considered and balanced reports. Obviously that path was not open to me, so I had to rely on my good looks and charm (not my strongest points either to be fair, so i was kind of out on a limb) In the end I settled for humour to make me stand out. After much care full thought I left out most of the knob jokes and all but one of the terrible puns.

Unfortunately Mrs G had found something more important to do, rather than attend my presentation. When I spoke to her before I left she said something about being busy alphabetising our DVD collection.

Before I knew it I had given my report, and sat back down to thunderous applause, probably caused by the cessation of my pain causing puns, or because it was very close to lunch time, i am not sure which but my ego lapped it up all the same.

if anyone is interested they can view my full report at http://www.nuffieldinternational.org/reports/report.php

Just to boost my ego my report was 'Highly Commended' unfortunately this does not come with a life changing cash prize, or the sort of public accolade that leads attractive girls to throw there underwear at me in the street and beg me to ravish them. However again, the ego accepted it and was duly boosted.

Back in the real world, my grain trading career has yet to reap me a British bank busting bonus, (about 35p i would imagine) however I have just submitted my first ever expenses claim form. I don't have illusions to political office, but if I ever did I feel very confident now about my expense form filling skills not letting the side down.