grumpyf1

I had the house to myself last Friday night. Like all normal men, I went wild and spent the evening listening to remixes and different versions of the BBC News 24 music on Youtube. That isn’t normal? Ah. Well, maybe not for you, but that beep beep beep rhythmic music, slowly building to its higher-pitched ten second crescendo is the reason I’m in front of the TV at two minutes to ten every night, in the hope of catching it in all its stirring glory. I’m reasonably distraught if they only get time for the last twenty seconds, or they commit the ultimate sin and fade it, right before Huw Edwards stares intently at you for a few seconds, whilst sporting another natty tie and that slightly sinister sneer. Imagine my shock when I tuned in the other night... and they’d changed it. I don’t remember receiving a letter asking for my permission. The very least they could have done was give me a bit of warning, so I had time to prepare myself. Suddenly, it’s got synth-string bits going on....

I’m reasonably tough. Not wrestle-a-bear-to-save-the-damsel tough, but a bit better than burst-into-tears-at-the-sight-of-a-spider wussy. Just about, anyway. I’d fight you to prove it, but to be honest, that sounds a bit scary, and I’d probably lose. Last Saturday I came into contact with the most terrifying noise in the world ever. More alarming than, well, an alarm – even an alarmed alarm. More horrifying than someone saying “Your round? Great, I’ll have a triple whatever that really expensive whiskey is”. Louder than 50 Barry Scott’s trying to push their Cillit Bang on you. More piercing than Concorde flying in one ear and out of the other. I went to my nearly-nine (she is now) year old niecelet Rebecca’s birthday party. There were 20+ under 10s, largely of the female variety. If that sounds pretty scary straight off, someone had done the unthinkable, and added water. Much like those film critter Gremlins, mixing children with water, in this case a swimming pool, causes them t...

Whilst that impossibly young German chap Sebastien Vettel won a 3rd straight title in his Red Bull rocket-on-wheels last year, he had his toughest battle for the title so far, which sets us up really rather nicely for a high octane blast around Melbourne on Sunday. 2014 sees seismic changes to the F1 rulebook, involving much smaller engines, dramatically less fuel available, all sorts of clever-clogs energy recovery shenanigans, turbos, and the possibility that the familiar scream of the cars flat out might sound more like as asthmatic wasp in a particularly large tin. Before that, we get to see if Fernando Alonso can finally get a title in his Ferrari and tame his eyebrows, if Jenson Button can do the same as the main man at McLaren whilst continuing to be extremely laid back, if Lewis Hamilton has a chance now he’s swapped to Mercedes and started getting tattoos and dressing like a ‘gangsta’, or if any of the other peddlers of the world’s most expensive go karts can do the sa...

There is, however, a ‘Y’ in ‘Teambuilding Day’. Or, to be strictly accurate, a ‘Why?’ As in ‘Why am I maiming an innocent tomato and making glove puppets?’ A week ago this very day, I was partaking in that most peculiar of events - a Teambuilding Day. Whilst there are definitely people who find this kind of thing an uplifting, exciting, opportunity to bond with people in the organisation they barely know, chat happily to strangers, or come together to achieve a mutually satisfying goal, thus subtly demonstrating the power of a team, there are also people who find them truly baffling, awkward, depressing, and the sort of thing that leaves you thinking ‘I could probably have cleared the 170 emails in my InBox by now’. Or played 92 games of Solitaire. Or scanned my bottom on the photocopier and emailed it to people of a nervous disposition, just to see what would happen. After spending an hour trying to make a tomato zoom down a zip wire, detach itself, and land within a target o...

Yesterday this blog passed the 30,000 page views mark. You're thinking the same thing as me, right? Why? How can that even be possible? From starting up the blog, it took 27 months to reach 10,000, just 4 more to hit 20,000 and another 6 to get to this point. I can only presume you've mistaken me for someone else who is genuinely interesting, and landed here by mistake. Sorry about that. So, what's coming up in the future? Well, I'm not running Fantasy Formula 1 this year, so there will be less F1 stuff. I haven't decided exactly what I might do on here though - I have an odd OCD-esque need to do things in a structured way, so if I did one race review I'd wind up feeling the need to do one every race. We'll see on that one. The North West Evening mail still haven't cottoned on to the fact that I'm a hopelessly uninteresting writer, and are still printing my column every Friday (number 45 tomorrow is about teambuilding, and features a soc...

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...