issue28

DIY? SOS!! - My quiet little suburban utopia has been turned upside down this last week. No, there hasn’t been an uplift in crime, no old biddy has been robbed, attacked or run over crossing the road (which considering the average age around my way is 85, the statistics are surprisingly quite low). No swans have been shot causing public uproar – nothing, zip, zero. The norm was happening around here. Outside the room in which I write this it all looked grey and dreary as rain continued to lash against my window driven by the freezing wind. Then, by the time it took for me to go downstairs into the kitchen to make a brew and come back to laptop, my entire street had been filled with about fifteen various unmarked vans as if the FBI had stormed it.

What the hell was going on?

After closer inspection via a bit of curtain-twitching the penny then dropped. The BCC’s ‘DIY SOS’ crew had come to save the day on my neighbour’s house. Seriously, I’m not making this up. It was a welcome distraction from the grey exterior that had been becoming an all too regular view from my window. Of course I tried to get the presenter Nick Knowles to pose with a copy of MOTO magazine but he didn’t seem to welcome the idea. I wasn’t going to push it in case he thought I was a weirdo and I didn’t want his ego growing in front of me. To be fair, it did seem like they were working flat-out – at least when they weren’t all drinking tea and tucking into bacon sarnies. The more I looked out of my window distracted by the noise and chaos, the more I realised the irony. Here we are once again at this time of the year dealing with, for a better description, piss-poor weather. As you can probably tell I hate this particular season, well, in this country at least. It’s cold and wet all the time, there’s no racing going on and I’m not socialising with my motocross family which leaves me feeling a little flat and makes life feel a little bit meaningless.

It almost makes you think that DIY may well be the answer: I suppose at the very worse I could get high on the smell of Gripfill. Whacking your thumb with a hammer or clipping it on a track side post may bring the same result but I know which one I’d prefer. I just need to think of the good things to come. DIY isn’t one of them, unless that DIY is motocross.

But not long now and in the meantime we’ve got the American Supercross series so we don’t go cold turkey all together – talking of which, there’s still some of that growing mould in my fridge such is my current motivation.

Sod it I’m off to B&Q… Until next time, try to enjoy yourselves no matter what you do. - Jeff

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