Jungle Freedom Fighters

Back in 1999 I was living in Bath and working in Malmesbury doing Y2K stuff. One morning I pulled into a little mom and pop petrol station just outside Malmesbury to fuel up my Renault 5 GT Turbo Nutter Bastard car. As I was pumping fuel into the car I glanced around and saw this absolute vision of beauty. It was a red MGA from the 1960s and it was for sale inside the petrol station come car showroom. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

After this moment I always filled my car at this garage and gazed longingly at the MGA. A few months later I was driving out of Bath heading to Malmesbury and whilst doing a quite ridiculous overtaking manoeuvre I managed to end up in a head on collision and wrote off my Renault 5. Put a crease in the roof. This was the crash where the cops were trying to measure the skid marks I’d left behind and the immortal words of:

Cop with tape measure : “Bill, the tapes run out!”

Me, to Bill cop: “Well, that doesn’t sound good”

Bill cop: “No, it isn’t”

Anyway, I then had to buy a new car. I was torn between buying the MGA that I loved or buying a used MGF VVC. Given that I was regularly driving up to Manchester for the weekends I made the sensible choice of going for the reliable modern car.

Fast forward to June 2026 and into my inbox pops an email from Trade Classics with the monthly auction items. It contains an MGA. From 1961. It’s in Preston. Tick, tick, tick. Owning this car would tick off one of my last two remaining ambitions in life, namely to drive a car that’s older than me.

I slapped a bid in immediately. Somebody outbid me. I upped my bid and eventually people stopped outbidding me when I got to £16000. It stayed at £16k until about an hour before the auction was due to complete when some new guy came in and started bidding it up. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, I’d drank quite a lot of white wine by this point so I got carried away. Whatever he bid I’d just round up to the next thousand. He quit when I bid £22000 and I won the auction.

It has no seatbelts, no headrests, no wing mirrors, no door handles. The brakes aren’t that great and the cockpit gets really hot with heat from the engine. It’s an absolute bugger to turn the wheel when going slowly around corners but we all love it and very much enjoy all the attention we get when driving it down the road.

Finally the garage I built all those years ago has a resident.

Being the poor hard done by student that Amelia is she decided that she wanted to earn some money. I’ve always got loads of stuff to do and could always do with a hand so off we set on our multiple days of work.

Amelia earned some money. I got loads of stuff done and loved the time spent with my little girl.

There’s some fella who runs a ummm dunno, shop that sells weird stuff in Ince [ Wigan ] and he was on the news ages ago when he put a massive golden replica of David in his yard which was visible from the main road. The council kicked off and told him to remove it. He refused. The council eventually gave up and it’s there to this day.

Anyway, Amelia and I were driving through that part of Wigan and we came across it. We had to stop and jump out and take some pictures.

After twenty years of paying off the mortgage we finally reached the point where we could clear the outstanding balance and live a debt free life. It was quite a momentous day so we celebrated in the garden with Champagne and chocolates from Selfridges.

Happy days.

I’m really not sure why this picture of Violet tickled me so much. She reminds me of Mystic Meg or something.

Amelia properly knocked it out of the park this year when it came to birthday presents. She knew I was into cooking my seet and sour chicken balls and so bought me a new strainer thing to aid the process. It’s ace.

We came, we listened to some good bands, we paid far too much for what was essentially a shit chicken salad, we got rained on, we got cold and we left again.

Such a shame it wasn’t a week later during the 2026 May heatwave!

Jason and Paul organised a special birthday surprise and rented a narrowboat in Llangolen for 3 days.

We’d barely left the sight of the marina before I had a beer in one hand, a glass of wine in the other hand and various other shenanigans incoming.

A great time was had. Tunnels sailed through, beers drunk, lifty uppy bridges navigated, aqueducts crossed, and amazingly not actually that much rain.

We had a pizza party. Sarah, Dan and Freddie came over and later on we got a fire going. We positioned the fire under the sail shade and did some rough calculations about (3*pi*r)^3 or some such bollocks and decided the heat from the fire wouldn’t set fire to the sail shade. We forgot to factor in the embers being thrown out of the fire:

Cause:

Effect:

Fortunately nobody died or anything.

Oli bought me Elden Ring for my birthday in 2025. I played it on and off. Kept forgetting important stuff and basically rocking a magic build which is pretty good at keeping you away from trouble but not so good against bosses.

In March I set myself the goal of getting better at the game.

It was when I read about a rune farming trick where you shoot the bird and it runs off the edge of the cliff and dies and then you rest at the site of grace and it respawns…repeat, that I started improving massively. Suddenly runes don’t really matter and you can spend some time farming runes and levelling up your character and weapons. The entire game changed!

It took me a looooong time to kill the Fire Giant, it took me even longer to kill Mohg and I didn’t even get a percentage bump for killing him, but then I started powering though the game with help from Claude. This game is so god damned big that you really do need an AI agent to suggest tactics and where to go next.

This was after some epic boss battle – can’t remember which but whilst Oli was off on his second ski holiday of the year I managed to beat the Elden Beast and finish the game. According to Sony only 10% of players do this. Quite impressed with myself.

I’m now on my second play through and absolutely loving it.

“You’re twisting my melon man”

A while ago I was minding my own business having a spot of breakfast when Shaun Ryder and Bez turned up on the BBC Breakfast sofa talking about an upcoming tour. There and then I bought tickets for the Manchester gig.

“Call the fucking cops there’s a Beswick in town”

I even bought a souveneir ticket for a few quid…

“It’s gotta be a loose fit”

Much fun was had by all and we weren’t disappointed by the egregious prices being charged for a beer!

The wedding weekend finally arrived and Emma and I zipped down to Bath for the event. We decided to splurge a little bit this time and book a suite in the Royal Crescent Hotel and Spa. I cannot stress enough what a pleasant experience this was. From the moment we pulled up outside it was an outstanding experience. The Concierge came running over to carry our bags and drive the car away. Some people arrived just before us so we checked in a bit later, but in the meantime the staff had taken our stuff up to our room. The suite itself was absolutely top notch and as a bonus we could look out of our bedroom window over to St James’ Square where I used to live [ actually just off it on Park Rd I think ]. We went out for an explore of Bath and had a couple of afternoon drinks before meeting up for dinner with Michal and Maria.

Breakfast next morning was superb. Then we made use of the spa and I’ve never felt so much like James Bond in my life. The spa swimming pool really was like something out of a Bond movie. After the spa we got ready for the wedding and ended up with a bit of time to kill so we stopped off in the hotel cocktail bar. I’m running out of words to describe how fantastic the hotel stay was but the cocktail bar was absolutely out of this world. Beautiful beautiful place. We didn’t want to leave and go to the wedding! Anyway, after my morning of feeling like Bond I was perusing the cocktail menu and they had a Vesper. After chatting to the bar tender it seems the recipe for the Vesper was from the book rather than the movie. It had to be done!

The wedding itself was perfect. Such a great time. We had some photos outside and you could look across the valley to see the place we were staying. Met some excellent people, drank some fine wines, ate some great food, then fell asleep and all the stag lads gathered around and took a rather excellent photo.

An absolutely marvellous weekend from start to finish.

As part of my Parish Council work I organised a litter pick. Because I’m mean I roped in Oli and Violet to come help. We split into two teams to cover the surrounding area and between us all picked up 19 bags of rubbish. My local area is now much tidier.

This tractor has been a proper pain in the arse. Every god damned year I’m having to repair something on it. This year on the first outing there was a horrific clattering noise from the blades when I started mowing. It seems I managed to shear some pins off the blade mounting and the blades got out of sync and started bashing into each other. Not cool.

In the past I’ve always jacked up the tractor and got busy underneath it but it seems my jack is broken and leaking fluid so it didn’t feel very safe being underneath quite a heavy mower doing repairs. To minimise the risk of me being decapitated by a collapsing jack I bought a new bit of kit.

It’s glorious. Truly fantastic. Repairs were made with two new blade mounts costing £8 each and the mower is back in business.

Just a quickie, I took my tofu in batter cooking skills and upgrade it to chicken. Was equally fantastic.

Josh, who has featured in this blog many times, is getting married. He decided to have his stag-do in Munich….in February! We thought it was going to be wooly underpants and a big jacket type weather. Turns out climate change had other plans and it was a glorious weekend, especially on Saturday, but I get ahead of myself.

I initially booked my flight with EasyJet but that flight was getting in quite late and all the London boys were arriving in the afternoon, so I booked another flight with Lufthansa and then upgraded it to Business Class so that I could go to the lounge rather than hang out with the unwashed masses in Manchester Airport.

On the first night we went to the Bier Halle in Munich and had a fantastic time.

The next day was absolutely glorious. It was going to be the best day of the weekend weatherwise so a plan was formed to got to the Biergarten am Chinesischen Turm. First though Dragan and I went for breakfast and then Michal got himself together and we headed into Munich Old Town.

After some beers in the square watching the clock do its thing with the glockenspiel and the dancing statue things we walked over to the beer garden in the sunshine

Then a quick pedal bike tuktuk thing for me and Josh and off to the restaurant we all went.

The next day, Sunday, was a bit rainy but we ventured into town and had some early beers. Josh disappeared off to get the dressing on his wound changed. The last two trips I’ve been on with Josh has resulted in him being hospitalised. The boy is a menace. Whilst Josh was away I tucked into some Currywurst, with my beer.

Following the beers we went to a Karaoke bar where I absolutely murdered Dream On by Aerosmith which inspired me to set myself a 2026 challenge. More on that in August. I don’t think the lyrics had even begun before I ripped off my top and flung it across the room. German beer really is that good! Thai food followed and then Michal and I went on another mission. Then to bed and a frighteningly early start flying back to Blighty. Upon landing in Manchester I decided I hadn’t drank quite enough for the weekend and met Charlie and Ellie along with her cousin in Manchester for more wine and then home to sleep. Took me a good few days to recover from the trip.