Blank Frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction...

This morning I was enjoying a nice comfortable sleep having one of those good dreams that you can never seem to remember within a couple of seconds of being woken (other than that it was a good dream to be having) when I was rudely awoken by some arse driving at a frankly stupid speed down the road near our house. I thought it must be something like 4am...

I could only have been asleep for a couple of hours as I'd gone to bed at 1am and listened to the jukebox for what must have been nearly an hour before drifting off...

At first I lay for a while imagining what I could do to pay this inconsiderate twat back - like filling a bucket with quick-dry luminous paint, going to the end of the road and lying in wait for him (I say "him" as surely only a rather immature male would drive like that?) and throwing it over his car - no doubt his pride and joy if he was driving it around at 4am like a maniac - as he drove back past (the road is a dead end - what goes down must come back)...

Of course I had no way of obtaining quick-dry luminous paint or indeed a suitable empty bucket at 4am...

Anyway, he didn't come back (which means the idiot may well actually live down there and is endangering the local cats, squirrels, foxes etc with his nonsense) and so I was drifting off again when I heard the faint bleep you hear when the battery in your smoke alarm is running out...

Bleep, bleep...........bleep.............................bleep...

I noticed the bleeps weren't all at uniform volume and that the time between the bleeps was also somewhat random....

I thought "what clever people these smoke detector people are, if the noises were all the same volume and repeated at regular intervals, the human mind may well initially register them but soon switch off"...

I could hear Meg the Black Cat somewhere in the pitch black room licking herself the way cats do...

I decided I'd have to get up, get a step ladder, undo the smoke alarm and replace the battery - all in the dark and all without Anne being woken up....

I got out of bed and then I realised what was happening....

Meg was sitting in the corner round at Anne's side of the bed, drinking, or trying to drink, from a glass of water Anne had put down there in case she needed it in the night (she's suffering from a bit of a cough at the moment)...

Occasionally, as Meg tried to get deep enough into the glass to get a drink, her teeth were clinking on the glass...

Clink, clink...........clink.............................clink...

I grabbed the glass took it to the bathroom, emptied the contents down the sink and went back to sleep.....



Later this morning I drove out to Penicuik to hand deliver (two days late) Alastair's card and gift - well money actually - what else do teenagers want these days? - in my day you got what you were given AND you had to hand-write a thank you note...

Alastair wasn't in - he's sitting some test or other to allow him to ride a scooter whilst displaying L Plates...

On the way I nearly crashed the car. I was foolishly taking the photos to accompany this entry by holding the camera out the window...



Popped in to see my mum in Loanhead on the way back to town. She's looking well and has recently been told her organs are in better condition than those of many people younger than her.

Just a pity her back and legs are pretty much bollocksed up then...

Back to Edinburgh and to Jessops to pick up the eight sets of pics handed in yesterday at £6 a pop - it's an expensive business this going on holiday lark...

Even more so when you're told that the majority of the negatives on three of your eight spools are completely blank - how the f*** does that happen?

Random pictures mid-spool surrounded by blank spaces where all my lovely colourful shots of lakes and mountains ought to be???

To cap it off, I'm offered a refund of £8 for the £18 I paid re the three spools in question. Their excuse?

"Well we DID process the blank films"???

The last five or six times I've taken my films to Jessops something or other has gone wrong (but nothing as bad as this). Trouble is, they are the best "value for money" by a mile re the processing costs and they give you free films - we have a whole drawer full of 35mm film...

Notwithstanding this hoard, we have decided the time is right to move to digital...

The photos we did get will shortly be gracing the entries below re our holiday....