write.as/jonbeckett

It's 3:30pm on Saturday afternoon. I am supposed to be cutting the lawn, but the lawn mower has decided to stop working. I've busied myself with repeatedly filling the washing machine and hanging washing out to dry instead. I guess we'll have to call the guy that services lawn mowers. More money. I'll try not to think too much about that.

This morning I wandered down to the local rugby club to take our middle girl to “Tag Rugby” – they have just started sessions for children up to 18, and will be running them on Saturday mornings through the summer. This morning there were four coaches for four girls that turned up – I'm hoping if we get the word out that more girls will arrive, but fear owing to the part of the world we live in, the chances of attracting any more are minimal.

I've said this before – we live in the land of pretty people. The band of countryside you get around any major city where all the affluent people that work in the city live – and where all the trophy mums also live, with their perfect children – usually with names like Giles, or Aurelia. The parents would never dream of letting their daughters take part in any contact sport. They won't be here in the summer anyway – they'll fly out to somewhere exotic, leaving behind the house they bought in a school catchment area for term-time.

Yes, I've got a chip on my shoulder – because I work damn hard, I'm good at what I do, and I make a fair amount of money doing it – and then find myself living somewhere like this. If I ever breathe a word about the subject, my other half invariable snaps at me about “why don't you just move away then if you hate it so much?”. Don't get me wrong – the majority of people around here are great – it's just the minority of elitist snobs who somehow find time to be seen everywhere, all the time. If you go out for a rare night out, they are the ones who have somehow booked every table in every place you might go. They are also the ones that I once saw wreck a school fundraising event by buying half the raffle tickets, and then thinking it was tremendously funny when they won nearly every prize.

It's “them”, isn't it. The Man.

Anyway.

The washing machine is thundering away on it's tenth load of the day. I was supposed to be going shopping this afternoon with our middle daughter, but somehow ended up not going because she was tired – so I'm babysitting, and doing chores. I haven't seen our eldest much at all this week (which isn't unusual). There's a long, complicated story about why we don't see her, or involve her in anything any more – I'm not going to write about that today.

Right. Enough bellyaching. I'm going to have a read of blogs on the internet, and see if I can find some new ones. We seem to be a rare breed these days – those of us that write personal blogs. Everybody seems to have an angle – a niche.

The number of fashion blogs out there is unbelievable – quite what any of them think they have to say that is original is anybody's guess. Actually – I think we all know they are just recycling everybody elses content. Now and again you see a wealthy teenager with a camera that costs as much as some people's car, who seems to spend their life photographing their last restaurant meal, or the clothes they have bought that day. Of course, they update nearly every day because they eat out nearly every day, and go clothes shopping nearly every day.

I'm ranting again, aren't I.

I'm turning into the bitter old man we remember from our childhood – the man who chunters to himself all the time – mumbling complaints about this, that and the other. Maybe I need to get a yappy little dog that bites the postman? Call it “Hercules”, or something similar.