Two blogs in one

Sunday 25th May, 2014 and Bank Holiday Monday...

It seems, for the first time in my life, I forgot to write a blog yesterday, so today's entry will need to be a two-partner.

Nathan returned very late on Saturday night, on mini-break mid-way through his gruelling 9-day technical rehearsal in a swampy forest in Leicestershire.

He'd had drama on his journey involving an exploding tyre, which had literally blown-up in his face. He was more shocked than injured, but it wouldn't take a fool to realise he was lucky to escape that one with just ringing ears from the loud bang and a face splattered in mud and tiny fragments of rubber!

We spent the day running errands, printing photographs and the like. I had my second attempt at printing the wedding photographs at (another branch of) Snappy Snaps, and yet again they were done incredibly badly, all milky and pale and with no contrast and in many cases with the tops of heads cropped off the photographs. I don't actually know what to do to get these special pictures printed properly. As Nathan points out, we've really gone backwards in the field of photographic printing. The quality of the work of places like Snappy Snaps is so terribly low; one assumes a reflection of how few people actually require photographic prints. Most these days are happy to look at things online and when they do have photographs printed are content to look at poor quality in the same way that YouTube or camera phone footage to many young people is every bit as good as film. I have now wasted £150 in my quest. Baring in mind that I'm a pretty decent photographer with a finely-tuned visual eye, can any one recommend somewhere that actually cares about quality?

We spent the evening at the cinema. We'd not been for years, and of course Sod's law dictated that there was nothing on apart from ghastly action films and a few silly rom-coms (or as my spell check seems to want me to write, rom-comas!)

We opted for something about Drew Barrymore going on holiday to Africa. With Americans it's always "Africa"... That's about as specific as they can get. No doubt if they opted to go on holiday to "South Africa" one of their viewers would explode or learn too much about other cultures.

Today we went to Julie's house to eat quiche and watch Britain's Got Talent. We played my favourite game; let's see how long it takes the contestants or judges to utter one of that lengthy lists of pointless platitudes or cliches that are reserved solely for this genre of telly...

"I want this more than anything in the world."

"You gave it 110%"

"I didn't like it... I loved it"

"That was a world-class performance"

The list is endless, but I was particularly impressed to hear a girl in the line-dancing troop listing off six in a row. That's pretty astonishing even for BGT!

I did my weekly shop en route and treated myself to a watermelon and lime jelly from Sainsbury's. It's only a little snack tub. But here's a thing. The jelly apparently includes 33% of my recommended daily intake of sugar... And, wait for this... 8% of my recommended daily intake of SALT! Surely this is insane?