Two weeks ago today I was in Edinburgh having got married the previous day! That’s just insane!! We enjoyed those two days without any children as it was blissfully quiet and yet we missed them terribly. Since then we have returned to normality with a massive crash which is only to be expected. I have started my new career which is probably going to mean less time than I’d like with the family but sacrifices have to be made by everybody right…!

Well we have been discussing the opposite. The last few years of our lives have been all about sacrifice, it’s been a tough period for us financially which has definitely put other strains on the family but we’ve managed to pull through ok. Now we have decided that we need a little time to ourselves as well as time together away from the kids. We of course adore them and love spending time with them but other than our honeymoon I can’t remember the last time we went for a meal together just the two of us. we have vowed to start having date nights (that’s what grandparents are for right) even if it’s only once a month.

As for the time to ourselves thing I have started running again, something I enjoy and will help shed a few pounds. Yesterday was my 3rd run since I stopped over a year ago and I was well impressed to be running week 4 of the running program i use and keeping a 10 minute mile pace consistently over the running sections of the splits. I’ve started slow and am building up but if I carry on as I started I should be less flabby and less short of breath fairly soon.

I have now been married an entire week, crack open the champagne. After I gave a speech at a friends wedding I posted it here. I thought it only fitting that I post the speech I made at my own wedding. So here it is.

I would like to start by thanking everybody for coming today and sharing in this monumental occasion, admittedly there are times where it’s seemed more mental than monu (whatever monu means) but without all of you here today to help us celebrate our day there can be no doubt in anybodies minds that there would definitely have been far more food for me. Insert here the inevitable line about trawling the internet for things and blah blah blah. I did check stuff out on the internet and it appears that are only about 3 examples of speech on there. The serious one, the one done as a “quirky” poem and the funny one. I’m not big on plagiarism so I didn’t want to copy anyone elses speech, this of course could turn out to be a mistake as your stuck with what I have to say instead. Anyway In all seriousness though from family to friends, distant relatives to acquaintances, colleagues to nosey passers by and not forgetting those invited out of an imposed or implied necessity both myself and my wife thank you dearly for coming. We would also like to thank anybody who has bought us a gift regardless of what form that takes, we wouldn’t expect anybody to buy us anything at all so we appreciate your generosity as it will go some way to offsetting the cost of the food and booze you have just consumed.

Not everybody can be with us today, mainly because we don’t know everybody and as accomodating as Mount Pleasant have been I think inviting over 6 Billion people would probably be a bit of a mistake. However for the people that unfortunately cannot be here with us today we hope they are thinking of us as we are of them.

Ladies and Gentleman please raise your glass to absent family and friends

It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be here today without knowing the address in advance, but in addition to this I have to thank my parents. Throughout my life they have always been there for me, seriously ALWAYS, you just can’t shake em. But for all their interfering, telling me what to do, what to think and telling me which women were right and wrong for me, it just turns out that they are pretty much always bang on the nose right. Have you any idea how infuriating that is, how dare they, how dare they indeed. Very few people have had anywhere near as much influence on my life, and being the kinda guy I am I never tell them and pretty much object to everything they say to their faces before quietly following their advice behind their backs. So I guess I should admit now that I couldn’t have done any of things I have achieved in my life without you. Thankyou so much.

As many of you know my family has increased in size over the last few years, we are blessed to have these drains on resources in our lives. However the children have not been the only expansion to my family, Shirley and John have bizzarely accepted this big hulking child in a mans body in childs clothing like I was another mistake that their daughter had made and hoped would go away quickly. This not being the case they decided to make the best of a bad situation and treat me almost as if I was a part of the family. I can only thank them for raising their daughter to be such a poor judge of character. But I thank you both for the help you have given us over the course of our relationship and for caring for our children the way you do it’s truly made me feel like a part of the family. I’d especially like to thank Shirley without whom this wedding would not have been possible, she has sacrificed many a holiday to help us prepare for this day which is in part responsible for the economic downturn in Europe.

We are a modern family complete with our own set of inverted commas, and I would feel somewhat remiss if I didn’t also mention Carol, Andrew, Jane and Darren. The extent of our family is measurable only by the amount of love, comfort and support it brings with it and I would like to thank you all.

Ladies and gentleman if you will, a toast to My parents Anne & John and to Jen’s Shirley & John

I have known Neil longer than I’ve had a beard, and that’s a long time. He’s been there for me through thick and thin but as time goes on there seems to be less of the thin which I think goes for both of us. He’s been a great friend and although we have had periods where we have drifted apart we have always come back to each other and it’s felt like no time has passed. The guy has come all the way from Vancouver to be with us today so if you could all laugh politely at his jokes in case he wants his air fare refunding I’d really appreciate it. Dude, you’re awesome and bloomin well love ya. Which is why I ask you all to toast with me,

To Neil

As I mentioned, we do have 3 children who I think we can both agree make life a more entertaining and frustrating place in equal measure.Mason and Alfie look awesome in their little suits and while they aren’t making an active contribution to the wedding it has to be said it wouldn’t be the same wedding without them.

Ruby I’m pretty sure I’ve already told you that you look gorgeous but not when everybody was listening. You look amazing today sweet heart. Sam looks equally fantastic and we thank her from coming all the way from Barcelona to perform the duty she promised around two decades ago.

If you will please The bridesmaids

And so we come to my former crush, a woman i was pleased to call my friend, lucky enough to call my girlfriend, honored to call my fiancé and over joyed to call my wife. It is possible that Jen would have succumbed to my advances sooner if only she had known they were happening. i once told her that i enjoyed walking through town with her because people might mistakenly think she was my girlfriend. Thats a pretty heavy flirt right there, nothing. Eventually i had to be more blunt and eventually got my message across. I persued her for months, stalkers have been arrested for less but i just had to have her. Then one day when i had about given up hope and had gone out drinking to throw myself at the first woman even vaguely interested or drunk enough i got a phone call. Jen was in that night having a chinese takeaway with Gayle, the takeaway came with a fortune cookie not dissimilar to the those on your tables tonight. Jen had called me to accept my obsessive chasing as the beginnings of a relationship. The message inside will forever be remembered by someone, i’m not sure who but it’s neither of us. The truth is the words were unimportant, they were interpreted in such a way by Jen that she had an epihany and acted on it and it is that telephone call that will forever be imprinted in my heart because those words came from her not from a piece of paper in a wafer.

Jen i love you, those three words don’t seem to be enough but i’m sure you know that every little thing that you do, babay i’m amazed by you.

She’s done a ridiculously amazing job organising me, the kids and the wedding and i hope you can all agree that she’s done a truly stellar job of it all. One last toast To my gorgeous bride

Recently my domain was due to expire, I decided to change registrar and in a lot of ways wished I’d never bothered. The site was down for around 10 days but as I haven’t posted since August 2011 I doubt anybody noticed. This whole experience has, once more, brought me to think I should start blogging again. I’d like to pick a direction for the blog but don’t really know where to go with it so for now it would be a meandering wander through my brain (business as usual). However when deciding what my first post in nearly 9 months should be, it was a real no brainer.

In less than 5 weeks I will be getting married. Breaking forth into this undiscovered territory with my future bride is one of a multitude of ‘first’ experiences that I am glad to be doing with her. I had never truly 100% lived with a woman before, I had never had children with anybody before, I had never had a joint bank account with anybody before and I had definitely never, in my entire experience of relationships, thought I would spend the rest of my life with somebody before. At least not to the extent that I would buy them jewellery symbolising it, then have a massive expensive party in order to receive a document that states this as my intention. For numerous reasons the last 4-5 years of my life have been the most interesting, challenging, ever changing period of time I can recall, and I have loved every minute of it.

Weddings are stressful, that’s right you heard me right, all these people claiming that weddings are dead easy, stress free and don’t cause any conflict between family members are all lying to you. I always wanted a simple wedding, no fancy dancy bells and whistles, just us declaring our love for each other in front of friends and family. I say always, that’s a bit of a lie. What I always wanted was a massive ridiculous theme wedding where I got married in a kilt and chain mail holding a custom made axe with my long hair flowing in the Scottish breeze outside a castle with a plait in my beard. I began to realise not only the financial constraints of this plan but also that this might not be what my prospective bride wanted, it was at this point I began to want something simple. Weddings in the UK in this day and age however have advanced from simple affairs into the mass complex staged performances that would have seemed fanciful and ridiculous 20 years ago, thanks to the money machine behind weddings driving budgets into the stratosphere and beyond. I have no need for seat covers. Pieces of material that add no further practical advantages to the chair itself are pointless people pleasers. If a guest has their nose put out of joint because they have to sit on an uncovered seat, I will offer them recompense in the form a free realignment. Thinking this sort of stuff matters baffles me, it is fluff, window dressing a façade if you will.

I am pleased to say I think we have managed a balance somewhere in the middle and I am really looking forward to wearing my wedding ring, my wife wearing hers and not having to stand in front of a twinkly LED lit back drop. We don’t need all that, because we love each other, it’s that simple.

In the last twelve months i have visited the local tip more times than i have in my entire. I have experienced many things at the tip in this time including a member of staff taking a box of muesli out of a skip and loudly proclaiming to his colleague “there’s nowt wrong wi it”. I had never at any point however felt slightly threatened, until yesterday that is.

Since moving house there has been quite a lot of work to do, in fact there is still quite a lot of work to do especially in the garden. Last weekend i attacked the garden hacking, slashing, smashing and all sorts pretty much all weekend. I did not have time to take all of the garden waste and rubble to the tip, yesterday presented as the perfect opportunity to fix this. Off to the tip i run in the car, it took me four trips in total. Trips one, two and four presented nothing in the way of problems, trip three however was a bit of an issue. I took a lot of garden waste, mainly branches from some bushes i cut down which were loose in the back of the car meaning i had to grab arm fulls of branches. The result of this was that i occasionally dropped bits on the floor, while heading back to my car i picked up the bigger bits that i had dropped on the floor.

After finishing unloading the car i noticed at the back of my car a small pile of earth and some loose leaves. For me to pick this up would be ridiculous, i felt kinda bad about leaving it there but figured there was nothing that i could do and that the staff would have a way of cleaning it up. As i was getting in to my car a member of staff shouted to me, i walked over to him and he passed me a broom while saying “that’s a big pile of shit you’ve left there”. I was a little taken aback by what he had said to me, so shocked that i took the broom and swept it up. This is quite unlike me, i can be a little confrontational in situations like this. I think it was a cross between shock at the way he had spoken to me and the fact i wanted to come back and bring another load. When i gave the bloke the broom back he said “are you coming back?” i replied that i was, his response threw me even more “i’ll be waiting for you”.

I’ll be waiting for you??? I got the feeling that he didn’t mean to help me unload my car, it felt slightly menacing. I got in my car and drove home, with every passing second i was getting angrier and angrier with what had happened to the point that i almost turned around to go back. I got home and told Jen, she was as astounded as i was, thank god i thought it was just me. I decided that when i went back i would ask the guy for his name in order to report him. Trip number four i unload the car then do the full on movie moment where i stand at my car door with the key in the lock trying to decide whether or not to just leave it or ask for the guys name. I decided to ask, i approached the guy and asked his name which he gave me and then asked me why. Another member of staff was with him and he denied saying it. I told him i didn’t appreciate his tone and that i was goiong to complain, he then claimed that he recognized me and that every time i come i always leave a mess and that he was sick of it. Talk about trying to get yourself out of a sticky situation.

I will definitely be complaining, mainly because if he speaks to a guy my size (i’m not saying i’m massively muscular or anything but i am six foot seven) nothing is going to stop him speaking to other people like this and that is totally unacceptable.

It’s late I’m awake and thought i’d blog. This is not a game review it is merely me talking about my thoughts, and in this case frustrations, with a game.

Recently due to circumstances I won’t bore you with (I’ve only blogged about it minimally so as not to turn my blog into an online megaphone of dreary whining) any video games I have purchased have been very cheap as I don’t have a lot of cash right now. The price of the games I’ve been buying has a direct correlation to their age. One of the old and cheap games I have been playing recently is The Saboteur.

I remember thinking I liked the look of this games when it first came out and managed to pick it up recently on eBay for super cheaps. After the first five minutes I was genuinely surprised by the rude content, I honestly had no idea. Other than this it started quite nicely, characters were ok, I enjoyed the main characters OTT Irish attitude and turns of phrase. It had a playable flash back section, there was nothing to not like. I started to think it was very like GTA but the word Saboteur infers it will be sneakier. This was backed up by NPC dialogue meaning i was expecting a shit ton of sneaking. The problem being I never saw any possibilities for sneakiness.

Missions are assigned to you in a manner identical to GTA to the point I referred to it as Grand Theft Nazi in a tweet. So mission is rescue this guy from this building. Now if it were GTA you would be given hints, clues as to ways this objective could be met. This is not the case in The Saboteur, you are given no direction what so ever. It is literally the case that there is a building, you need to get the bloke out and that is it. On more than one occasion I died at least 10 times just trying to get in said building, I am not claiming to be an awesome gamer but this was irritating as shit. It was pointed out to me by my dear lady that I was stupid because I said I needed hints. This (I hope) is not the case but I’d like to think anybody who has played GTA knows what I mean. It gives you enough information to work out how you are supposed to do it rather than than dumping you outside a building for the following to happen.

Ok, stealth kill a Nazi steal his uniform, approach building, another nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

Sneak around the back of the building, climb up building, a nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

Sneak to another building, climb that, use telephone wire to go to next building, sneak around on roof, a nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

Find a truck near the building, plant explosives to cause a distraction, walk away from truck, truck blows up, a nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

I get totally fed up with sneaking, run in guns blazing, kill many Nazis, either complete mission or get loads further than usual, many nazi’s have seen me and sounded the alarm, death

Suffice to say I got so annoyed with this I’ve decided to give up on the game altogether. I don’t care enough about it to endure this on nearly every level. I was hoping for a game that would set missions where after poking about a bit you would say “oh right, that’s what you need to do”. If I then die knowing I’m doing the right thing then it’s not a problem, but to die that often and still have no idea how to progress???? Not worth my time and barely worth the money.

Last night during a conversation with Jen it was sort of decided that I need to get a social Work job regardless. I have taken steps to put my family before my career recently in that I soon start a job I don’t really want in order to ensure my family don’t suffer. I find this fact a little depressing as anyone would and Jen doesn’t want that for me.

My amazingly supportive wifel (which as everybody knows is a woman’s title in the year before she gets married, a man is wusband), who put up with me not having any money while at Uni and then continued doing so after I graduated, suggested that I start looking further afield for jobs.

This could mean one of three things as far as I can tell.

1/ big ass commute – Some of the jobs I’m looking at would involve a very large commute by my reckoning around a 150-200 mile round trip. I would more than likely need a car while at work Which means unless I leave my car somewhere in the area I’ll be working (an insurance nightmare) I cannot use public transport. Doesn’t sound very appealing to me as I will surely be tired and cranky all the time as a result of prolonged hours on the road. Not to mention the ridiculously early mornings combined with not getting home till kids are in bed. The petrol cost isn’t really factoring on this decision as I would rather earn call centre wages after travelling costs doing something I’m passionate about, enjoy doing and spent 4 years getting qualified to do than work in a call centre. I am not doing down call centre workers, I’ve done it myself. It’s more the wasted qualification aspect I’m getting at.

2/ live away from home through the week – reeeeeeally hate the idea of this prospect. I do not want to be away from my family and as I’ve pointed out my family come first for me. However Jen says that we would cope, she is prepared to essentially become a single parent in order for me to do the job I want to do (I am ridiculously lucky to have this woman in my life). I would hate being away from the kids and I would hate knowing that Jen was on her own looking after them and that I could do little to help her. The cost aspect of this would depend heavily on where I got a job but again I refer you back to my comments on cost regarding transportation in option 1.

3/ The whole family moves – this solves the issues in 1 & 2 but creates a whole bag of its own issues. We have only just moved into a house that was essentially built for us (not quite but almost) and as a result are in a stupidly fortunate position due to not having a mortgage. To move would change this plus we would be moving out of our beautiful new house into rented accommodation before possibly looking to buy in the area we move to. Then there’s Ruby, she’s about to start school in September so it could mean uprooting her out of school shortly after starting. We would still have to come back home at weekends so Ruby could see her dad meaning traveling a lot at weekends effectively making our weekends shorter and way less enjoyable.

It’s a great big sloppy mess potentially which is why I haven’t looked previously but it may be my only way forward in My chosen profession. Of course this may all be redundant as job opportunities are liable to be as scarce and have as many people applying for them as they do locally, but I have to try.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post, actually that’s generous. Yesterday I wrote an enormous angry rant. The angry rant was then accidentally deleted. That is what actually happened, it was written on my iPhone and I didn’t save it before restarting my phone and this was probably for the best.

I was angry because I had been put in a dangerous position at work and luckily with assistance handled the situation. Actually I wasn’t angry about this at all, the thing I was angry about what happened the following day when I mentioned it to the agency I did the work for. I was informed by the agency that I was in the wrong! Apparently what I should have done is remove myself from the situation. I’m not entirely certain how you can remove yourself from a situation where you have been attacked without provocation so I asked for clarification. The following conversation was a back and forth of them reciting company policy and me getting angrier as I asked how that was possible in the situation I was in to which I never got a satisfactory response.

After getting commended for my actions by my peers and thanked for the help I gave them to then be told I was in the wrong was frustrating as hell. I had reassured my colleagues that in a situation such as that I had their backs only to find out that the agency didn’t have mine. I am a passionate and sometimes impulsive twit and it took everything in me not to tell them to stick any further shifts somewhere uncomfortable as I have done in a few jobs in the past. I held on to the thought that I would not be working for them much longer and need the money, it was all I had and appears to be all they offer. Now I’ve calmed down I can see the irony in the fact that they were giving me little support in my role as a support worker.

At this point I have only had access to Google+ for a day but I wanted to write down a few thoughts not necessarily to do with the service more to do with how I use social networks.

First off I love google+ I get the same feeling using it that I did using Facebook for the first time. It’s simple straight forward and just works. I can definitely see me using it in the future if it weren’t for one thing, Twitter.

These days I barely use Facebook, I really don’t like it. So why do i use it?? The issue is that Facebook is jam packed full of people that I know that don’t use Twitter, namely family and people who don’t recognise how awesome Twitter is. The way I have come to use Facebook is to share thoughts and content that I think both my Twitter followers and Facebook friends may be interested in. Twitter is my mainstay, I love it and have many real life friends on there. So the way I operate is I throw everything at Twitter both directly and through 3rd party services. Those 3rd party services also update Facebook and then I occasionally throw scraps of the direct content at Facebook as well.

This basically means I use Facebook as a secondary, in fact for the most part I don’t even log on to Facebook itself. I only ever go on if somebody has sent me a message relating to a piece of content I have pushed there via Twitter, four square, posterous, my blog or similar. As little as I use it I’m loathe to get rid of it as I do occasionally strike up an interesting conflab with an old friend I don’t stay in regular contact with. What the hell has this got to do with Google+ you may be thinking, well I will tell you.

I can’t see me leaving Twitter anytime soon, so deeply does my love for it run. I think Google+ has a lot of potential, so much so that I don’t want to treat it like a skanky ho in the way I treat Facebook, I think it’s to good for that. The problem is when using two social networks one is likely to be treat in this way. No matter how hard you try one will be dominant over the other. I can’t see anyway that Twitter will be deposed by G+ as Twitter remains so basic, so simple and easily accessible.

So to sum up I want to use G+ effectively, I want to utilise it well but the thing I foresee happening is that I will ditch Facebook and G+ will take its place which is exactly what I want to avoid happening. It’s still early days and I’m sure G+ has even more potential than I have seen in the short period I have been using it but so far my feelings are that I would quit Facebook in a heartbeat for it. However it’ll take something major to make me a Twitter Quitter.

Hey I’ve got this blog thing I never use, it’s probably a good place to record something as important as the birth of a child.

While this post is delayed it is delayed for fairly good reasons ie kids take up a lot of your time. Please welcome to the world my now more than week old son Alfie Flynn Langley.

I should have known when I booked a Friday 13th dental appointment that it would not be a lollipop and rainbow experience, but little did I know I would be seen by a rogue dentist with no regard for pain and a maniacal laugh.

I knew from the get go I was not
getting my regular dentist, I’m not scared of the dentist or anything but yesterday morning I tweeted:

Friday 13th and I have a dental appointment with a different dentist. I have @SteveMartinToGo in Little Shop of Horrors in my head

I arrived and was warmly greeted at reception, this changed fairly quickly when I was asked if I pay for my dental treatment. I answered no and the girl on reception instantly ceased smiling and took on the persona of an eastern European woman in a late 80′s to early 90′s Hollywood film. “what do you claim” was her terse response. After signing the necessary paper work with a big beaming smile on my face to try and counteract that chill in the room I was directed upstairs. I waited no more than five minutes before being directed into a room. I was greeted by an eastern European woman with the persona of an eastern European woman from an from a late 2000′s early 2010′s real life. This however may well have been smoke and mirrors because before long she was operating that equipment with the same dexterity and ability to cause pain as Niska from Firefly.

I told her of the recent sensitivity I have had in my molars, she had a poke about and decided to x-ray my teeth. This discovered a cavity within one of my teeth. She injected me, it felt to me like it was the wrong place but what do I know, I’m not a dentist. She immediately picked up the drill, IMMEDIATELY!!!!! My mouth did not feel numb at all, she told me to raise my hand if I felt any pain. I tried to raise my hand on feeling the pain but I think the massive head jerk was probably her first clue. It was decided we should wait a minute to let the anaesthetic take, genius thinks I but did not dare voice as I was obviously dealing with a dangerous and highly trained woman. Once mote the drill came out and once more I writhed in pain. This then happened a third time before she decided to give me another shot of as anaesthetic which not only felt like it was in the right place but after a few minutes numbed my face.

The hole was drilled with me only being able to feel the vibrations in my skull. The dental nurse said in a shocked voice “what are you using” I shat my pants, this was no time for highly experimental tools or procedures. If she was considering using an old skool piece of apparatus that her mentor showed her when performing emergency dentistry in an unlikely scenario I didn’t want to hear about it. Fortunately for me her response was “composite” which took both me and the dental nurse by surprise, you could feel the nurse’s disapproval. This meant I was getting a White filling, I was getting a free White filling. I got the feeling the nurse was just dying to tell the dentist off but swear I saw the dentist give her that “know your place bitch” kinda look. It was absolutely intense as I’m sure this conveys.