Here is a diary entry of mine from the year 2000. One day from august each day this week.

Saturday - Uncle Bob's Wedding Reception

I don't wake up until 10am. 12 hours sleep. I feel tired still, but I know I'm better now which is great. I go out with my parents to buy computer equipment and a car. I've finally gotten annoyed enough with the external modem in my computer that I tried reinstalling the drivers and the whole thing broke. There was a "flash ROM mismatch", which means that the actual hardware was damaged by a stupid software issue. I decided that considering I had only paid £15 pounds for this piece of junk and it had served me reasonably well for the last year I may as well buy a half decent internal one to stand us in good stead for next year.

My father decided to buy a car, to go with his new house. I'm not sure if I'd told you about the new house that he's bought up in Shropshire. It's in a town called Ludlow.

The house is quite an old with a modern extension. The old part is 15th century and the extension is from the 16th. A large part of the house is mottle and daub. The house is listed and the front is independently listed. Another specifically listed part is in one of the rooms in the new part of the house which was re-paneled when James the 1st came to visit. The owner of the house's daughter was getting married and the reception took place in the room. Soon after the king left, a plaque was erected in the room, it is also listed. Everything in the house needs to be redone. It needs extensive roof work and central heating which is vital not only to keep things warm but also to kill the woodworm and death-watch beetle.

A car is needed to move things up to the house so we went and checked out Honda and Toyota's offerings. In the end we bought a Honda. We looked at their Joy Machine but we decided not to get it in the end. We got a CRV, at least that's what I think they call it.

So we got back to the house in the afternoon. And there was a message on our answer-machine saying that one of our friends had died. If you remember when I went out to America earlier this year it was for a wedding but also to see a friend who was quite sick. His name was Jack, and he was really not well, he had a brain tumor and was in quite a bit of pain so in lots of ways it was a good thing that he didn't have to have that pain anymore. Still quite jarring though. I'd known him for 18 years, but the saddest thing is that his kids are the same age as me, and I don't even want to think about how hard it must be for them right now.

But there is a way of dealing with these things. And I think it's to deal with them slowly. Don't know exactly if it's the best way but certainly it's what I always do.

As the day is progressing I'm starting to feel quite tired again. I can't cancel Bob's that would be terrible. But I don't know how I'm going to cope with it. I call Kris to find out when we are going to meet up. During the week he had said something like "I think we usually say 7:30 but that's probably a lie." It is of course, we both know that. So I call him and he claims 8:30 but again this is probably a lie. He says he is going to call me when Joe and him leave as it will take him longer to get there than it will take me. So I have some dinner, but about mid-way through I get a craving for beer. I decide that there probably will be someone at the pub anyway.

I finish up dinner and head off. Jump on the tube and off again at the other end. Full of energy full of life. 10 minutes alone in the pub soon puts a dampener on the situation. So I order up a can of Red Bull to have with my beer. It perks me up a little. There is one person sitting outside who I kind of recognize but certainly I'm not going to go up to him and find out if I do or not. He's sitting outside on one of the tables, and as all the other tables are taken I'm inside with some strange sports channel on the TV. Outside certainly is the place to be. I see somebody else who really looks familiar but yet again I am not sure. He has noticed that one of the outside tables has emptied out. This means that the two people I think I recognize are sitting outside next to one-another but on separate tables.

Then Pauly walks in, and I feel relief. This is about half an hour after I arrived. He tells me that the guy who has been sitting outside the longest is his former housemate Gaz who I have met before a long time ago. So after getting more beer outside we go to sit with him. We're chatting and another half an hour later Kris and Joe turn up. Of course the guy sitting behind us is someone I know, and I've just been ignoring him. It's Harry, the other Harry, the one who was in the Italy t-shirt at Kris' party. Obviously he looks quite different without the shirt on, or rather with a different shirt on. So he joins us as well, and just as we are all getting arranged Darryl and Reefa show up, and the troupe is complete.

So after some amount of conversation and beer we hit the party. There is some kind of Hen night present which makes it quite packed and there are lots of strange people running around chasing each other. The resident happy couple, Darryl and Reefa, are trying to encourage me to go out with some woman who is wearing a red sequined dress. I can't tell if Reefa is joking or not but she tells me "that you can tell she's gagging for it by her white shoes." Which is quite odd considering I would have thought wearing the brightest coloured dress in the venue would have done it.

A little later Matt, as in Flipper, shows up. He looks totally crazy. And Kris says he's been smoking all afternoon which would certainly explain his mood. Although how Kris knows I never find out. He's drinking for the first time in ages, that I've seen, and very few of his sentences make logical sense. We have a lot of fun talking at cross purposes all evening. Oh and I almost missed it changing from one day into the next.