Today I had a bizarre experience. I’ve been thinking about it all day and really have no explanation for what happened. I’d like to think I’m a fairly normal, rational guy but on the other hand maybe I’m losing it. Draw your own conclusions.

I was in the garden with Mason preparing to put him in the car as we were going out. Mason pointed at the sky and said “oh look daddy, from outer space”. I presumed he’d seen a plane and turned round to look and saw something that I don’t believe I can possibly have seen. It was a long thin cigar shaped fast moving white object in the sky. I looked at it for over a minute because I could see nothing to show that it was in fact the plane I expected it to be.

The object had no wings, no tail and was not leaving a vapour trail. Planes pass over our house fairly often as we live within a 10 mile radius of an international airport. As a result many of them are low flying so the wings and tail are easy to see. Occasionally we get long haul flights flying over from further afield and not going to our local airport but these are usually so high that they look tiny and on a clear day you can still see the wings.

The object I saw appeared to be of a size that if it was a low flying plane I would have been able to see wings easily and it appeared way to big to be a plane flying higher up. I tried taking a photo as I knew this was a fanciful story however I could not find it on the screen of my camera phone to do so. This could well be a limitation of my camera phone however but it does add to that spooky weird unexplained element of the story.

So what did i see? I have no idea. Logic tells me it was a plane and for whatever reasons I couldn’t see the wings. A big part of me however doesn’t think that is the case, and the chances are i’ll never find out.

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.

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.

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 have now lost count of how many ‘I haven’t blogged for ages but I’m gonna start blogging again’ posts I’ve made and frankly it’s started to annoy me so rather than blah blah blah this is what I’ve been up to since the last post round ups I’m just gonna open up with a story about my own childish stupidity.

I recently moved house (ok so that kinda says a bit about what I’ve been up to since my last post but honestly there won’t be any more) and this new house has a distinct lack of carpet, it could be said that it is in fact carpetless. Being a mature 34 year old father and role model brings many responsibilities, one of which is teaching the children how to correctly slide on shiny floors in socks, I feel so passionately about this that I even do it when they are out, it may appear to the untrained eye that I do this purely for my own enjoyment but I can assure that is totally not the case.

Yesterday I was in a rush to get out the house but as I got to the front door realised I did not have the car keys, I took a few large quick steps then set in to skid. It was majestic, gliding across the floor like a piece of butter on a hot pan right up until I hit a less shiny piece of floor. My feet stopped, I carried on and I crumpled up on the floor with a pained blood curdling yelp. Yes I’m 34, yes I’m a child, no it won’t stop me doing it.

The saga continues, in my Last post I spoke of how I probably wasn’t entitled to jobseekers and this has turned out to be the case however this is the least of my worries.

My not being entitled to Jobseekers was quite frankly a punch in the face, more due to the fact that my lack of entitlement seemed to be based on the fact that I went to university to try and better myself rather than the fact they wouldn’t give me any money. The reason for this is that Jen works and as a result we are entitled to working family tax credits. This tops up whatever income is coming in meaning regardless of whether I got jobseekers or not we should still get approximately the same amount of cash coming in. That is of course if they get everything to do with our claim correct, I mean they won’t screw that up will they…?!?!?

Yeah they did!

The friendly helpful guys at working family tax credits decided way back in February when I told them I was no longer employed that they would not bother altering my income. So they had me working zero hours a week but still earning a full time wage, the result of course is that we are getting a lot less cash than we should. Now this story would be pretty dull if it ended there so let me continue. The start of the new tax year means that all information is frozen as they are sending out annual renewals, I will receive my renewal anytime between now and June. They cannot send my renewal out any quicker, tell me when it’s coming out or change any details until we get it meaning we could well be receiving several hundred pounds less than we should until possibly June.

I’m not entirely certain how they expect us to feed our kids and apparently they don’t care. There are people who resign their entire lives to not working, play the system to their advantage and rake in a decent sum of cash being work shy gits, I want to work and have fallen on hard times and get squat.

Oh and a little added bonus, there is such a thing as a crisis loan which can be obtained. It’s an interest free loan from the social fund to be used, as the name suggests, in a crisis. I would say barely having enough cash to cover the bills would constitute something in or around a crisis, the question is would they? Well we won’t find out because the very fact that we get payments from working families means that we are not even eligible for a crisis loan.

Life gets more fun by the day

I’m sat in a house that we are due to move into in 2 days and it looks like a before picture rather than an after.

To say Jen and I are doing to much is an understatement of the highest order. Neither of us has had a day where we haven’t been at either work or the new house trying to get it fit to live in since January 4th and the stress levels are teetering over the edge of epic and plummeting into biblical. This is not our only stress of course because the local supermarket a 3 for 2 offer on stress and Jen can’t resist a bargain. A baby on the way and a wedding a year in may (don’t worry there will be no more rhymes, it was an accident) and throw into the mix that I’m recently unemployed and it’s all a bit messy but it got messier still when I went for my ‘work focused interview’ at Job centre +, I think the plus is that they have a working bog.

Quite depressed about the prospect of claiming dole already I arrived to find the experience was very different to my last dole experience approximately a decade ago. On this occasion I saw nobody that I thought was going to try to sell me drugs, beat me up or ask me for business. A harsh sentiment from a qualified social worker you may think but ten years ago I found the whole dole experience rather intimidating and frightening, I’ve grown up now I am no longer that person so perhaps this is why my thoughts were different, either that or it was only 11.30 so they were all still in bed. When my number was called (or when it was up which is a scarily accurate analogy) I was informed of something that made me want to punch somebody in he face, not the guy delivering the information as I am aware of his lack of control in this situation. He informed me that I MAY NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR JOBSEEKERS.

WTF how can I not be? Basically because I went to university. Jobseekers eligibility is decided bass on the amount of tax paid in the last two full financial years so in my case April 2008-April 2010, when I was at uni!!!! The guy sat there and told me I may not get a penny. The fact that I worked solid from 1994 to 2007 with only 2 months of unemployment in that time means absolutely nothing. I was incensed (which is an awesome word if nothing else) and may have sworded at the nice man who’s fault it was not. I did work in that time period but not a lot so the chances are I’m gonna be shafted. The hideous bit is if I’d become unemployed after April I’d have been judged on 2009-2011 in which period ive worked a ton more. Life, kicks you in the nuts before feeding them into a wood chipper while laughing maniacally.

Rant over

I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been busy recently what with my new job, getting ready to move house, baby on the way and a wedding in the offing. While I am not working in the profession I spent 4 years studying for I am working within those circles and was heading towards becoming a social worker. That was until today.

I’ve only been doing this job for a month, I took a risk quitting a full time job to do an agency job on a short term contract in order to work in a social services department. I was seeing it as my foot in the door and so was my new manager, everything falling into place I’d be a social worker within months hurrah. Unfortunately something happened that was out of mine and my managers control, foot still firmly in the door and a council big wig slammed it on me.

Cuts, they are happening everywhere and are affecting a lot more people than me. The decision was made in the higher echelons of local government that a good way of saving money would be to stop paying agencies the exorbitant amounts they charge for staff, get rid of the agency workers and we will save money. It’s not exactly a rocket science move on their part, it’s true that agency workers cost more than regular workers I get why they made that decision but as they have made a blanket decision without even knowing what that will affect they haven’t got the full picture.

Rather oddly my job saves the council money even though I’m agency staff. Getting rid of me and my colleague leaves a gap in services, I’m sure we are not unique in this of course. Without my job existing (which it won’t at all in any shape or form) makes social workers jobs harder and it means that the work I do will have to be contracted out to specialist agencies, agencies that cost a hell of a lot more than employing me costs.

Sour grapes and wot not aside I’m applying for every job going but due to a need to provide for my family in anyway I’m going to have to go on the dole because the scraps the agency are saying they can throw me just won’t cut it.

Life, don’t talk to me about life