On Throwing Around Accusations of Marathon Running; Worrying About Absconding Cats; Coat Commemorations

A blind student at work just ran the London Marathon (in five hours!) and I was just looking him up on the website when it occurred to me that with all the thousands of runners, there may well be someone with my name running, and therefore I could claim to have run the marathon, in order to gain some much needed respect from my peers. Possibly also a bit of awe at the dedication I put in with my training, and the selfless way I didn't brag about how hard it was: "He didn't bang on about it; that was typical of Jim". I think I'd stop short of claiming to have raised massive amounts of money for charity, as I don't want to get too Jeffrey Archer, but I'd probably get carried away in the deception. Anyway, there wasn't anyone with my name, but the idea of running the marathon for zero effort was just too attractive to me, so I started looking up other people to see if they could start to live a life of exciting misrepresentation of the facts. I then stumbled across the names of one of my friends' fathers, and it's not like their name is David, Steven or Christopher. No, it's a name with no vowels in it - that's obscure. They did it in 7 hours, which is a bit slow, but they finished at exactly the same time as someone with the name of their daughter. Too coincidental, I thought, so I sent a text accusing them of having a father and sister run the marathon.

Got an email back, and turned out it wasn't them, but a curiously fluky couple of people with exactly the same names. They even had good alibis.

Don't let my disappointment stop you though; accuse someone you know of having run the marathon today.

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I let the cat out into the garden yesterday, and she immediately went into next door's garden to hiss at the other neighbourhood cats, both of whom are about twice the size of her. She then disappeared into another garden, and all I could hear was the sort of noises that they have as sound effects in cartoons illustrated by a big ball of dust moving along with occasional fists and legs coming out. Fortunately, she stopped fighting other cats and came back, minutes before L came home and I'd have got in trouble for losing our cat. Not that this was my primary worry, oh no.

Mog's main fighting technique, from what I can tell when she squares up to the cat that sits on the other side of the glass outside our bedroom window, is to hiss, which unleashes her terrible breath. Man, it's bad.

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In order to screw up our collective chances of a good summer, I've started wearing my summer jacket. And bought some garden furniture. To counter this bad karma, I've just bought two wooly hats. Come on then, weather, what do you think of that?

On the subject of my summer jacket: I've had it for 9 years. Next year will be it's 10th birthday. What can I do to celebrate this fact. I could give it a badge saying 'I am 10', but it would be quite hard for the ordinary nerk on the street to distinguish this being my coat's 10th birthday, not mine. Any ideas? I could take it away somewhere nice for a weekend, I suppose.

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Oh, and I'm sorry to those who's bosses are so full of humbuggery that they block access here. I'd get myself worked up about freedom of speech, censorship and so forth if I didn't agree with them. Get back to work!