The current Uborka regime includes gym membership, which means that we trail reluctantly to the municipal gym twice a week and spend grudging half hour watching crappy MTV. We eat first, give it half an hour or so to digest, and by the time we get back and have a shower, it’s pretty much bedtime. We both resent the extent to which the gym encroaches on our free time.
So exercise = twice-weekly torture, with additional guilt that we should probably do it three times. This can’t go on, so Team Uborka has come up with some better ideas.
I want to learn to dance. In Venice we saw couples waltzing in a moonlit piazza to the sound of a gypsy violin. I want to do that. And while I may not be the world’s most musically-inclined individual, the deal seems to be that Pete leads, and I just hold on to his shoulders and copy him. Soon we will be gliding across the floor like Daphne and Niles, just you wait and see. As a bonus, learning ballroom dancing adds to our eccentricity quotient, and around here that’s seen as a good thing.
Pete thinks we should play squash. He claims to have played a little at university, and has a sketchy grasp of the rules. Until yesterday, I had never played it in my life. Squash is surprisingly good exercise for someone who famously has no hand-eye co-ordination whatsoever.
Soon we will be able to give up the gym forever!

As some of you know, I live with Karen in a terraced house-type thing across the road from a train station. Okay, it’s not really a house. It’s an orange juice carton, and we open the lid when it gets too sticky.
I can hear your brain clawing its way back onto the rails. Once you’ve caught up, proceed to the next sentence.
So I park the car outside the train station, and that’s super. This morning I walked outside into the bright crispness of a wintry March, and commenced the processes which would ultimately lead to me driving to work. But lo, hindrance! My windscreen was quite quite covered in ice, except for one corner.
Upon further investigation, I saw that the boundary between icen glass and dicen glass displayed correspondence with the edge of a shadow. Upon tracing the shadow back to its source, I located the culprit. An advertising hoarding!
This enormous advertising hoarding prevents the rising sun from defrosting my car’s windscreen! Burn it! Burn it!
Or I could just park in a slightly different place.
Sea Level Sky

Statistics claim that the Labour party have created an average of three new criminal offences per day since they came into power. As we all know, statistics can rarely be trusted, but the point is not lost. We have a lot of laws. We have so many laws that it is impossible for one person to know about all of them, which makes it very hard for them to stick to them.
I propose that we start from scratch, with the Uborka Law Directory, in which we shall start from the drawing board and see if we can come up with a minimal selection. You may find this site helpful.
1. Murder is a crime. A nice easy one to start with.
2. All football team colours should be pastels, or be decorated with images of pretty flowers and bunnies. This will do wonders for hooliganism.
3. Standing still for too long is a crime, unless you have a good reason to be there. Don’t loiter. Find something to do.
4. Theft is a crime. Theft is defined as taking something from someone that does not belong to you.
5. Creating new criminal offences in order to narrow or broaden the definition of “theft” is a crime.
6. Driving a dirty monstrous SUV when your needs do not require it is a crime. If you need the “loadspace”, get a Volvo estate.
7. Scooping snow off of the top of my car for snowballs is a crime. That’s MY snow. Fuckers.

What the hell is going on? Hunters and hunt saboteurs lamping eachother left right and centre, Man Utd fans and Everton fans rucking in the streets? Doesn’t this all just seem a little bit uncivilised?
Seriously, people. Foxes matter, yes. Football matters, yes*. But they don’t really matter that much, in the grand high scheme of things. I’m past caring about your** beliefs, and I think that everyone else is too, with the exception of yourselves. Whatever it is that you are fighting for, one thing is for sure – right now, you’re not doing the world any favours.
Life’s too short to be this consumed with anger and hatred. Chill the fuck out, a’right? Think of the children.
(I actually wrote this three days ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t post it back then, but either way, that’s the reason for this remark on a topic which by now has dropped from the headlines.)
* Okay, I’m pushing it slightly with this one.
** Not YOU, obviously. Hopefully it should be obvious from context who I am addressing here.