a couple of weeks. Now then, what’s been happening….

Blair (as usual) e-mails a raft of people who had the temerity to sign a petition denouncing road tolls/congestion charging by telling them he’s going to do it anyway. Quelle surprise! What he singularly fails to grasp is the fact that we Brits abhor the idea for many reasons :-

– The levels of taxation don’t correspond (even roughly) with the levels of expenditure on public transport subsidies, improvements, rail links and improving roads.

– Out of 83p per litre fuel, roughly 50p or more of this is tax

– We also pay £170 or so per year road tax

– We pay the highest per mile rail charges in the whole of Europe, and some of the highest in the world.

I would have thought with any modicum of common sense that it would be quite easy to work out that if a country is more productive because they can do business easily by travelling easier, then this works out better for the Government in as much as less welfare state payments, more income tax collected, people in better health etc. etc. Many countries such as France and Japan have wised up to this already and run the transportation system at a loss, but the flipside of this are amazing, arrow straight train lines than run on time and roads in fantastic condition with little or no congestion on motorways.

I’ve said more about that than I was going to, but hey!

A little over two weeks to BrainShare – finished my presentations, had them proofed and glossed, it all looks good. Never before have I had much of a crisis of confidence, but I feel like a bit of a fraud. Here I am talking the talk about Linux, and haven’t much walked the walk. Perhaps I’m being a little unkind to myself, I suppose it’s all relative. With four sessions to deliver, I can’t afford to have this hanging over me, so I suppose my usual approach of all our honesty may win the day. Well at least it isn’t a boring sales pitch, or that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.

Another fine win for Wigan today, I do hate 1-0’s though. Alan Wiley had a stinker, booking players on sight from our side, and it wasn’t even a dirty game (not like the Carling Cup Final later ;-)). That said, the John Terry thing was a little unsettling. Hopefully he will be OK. Anyhoo, we maintain the uneasy gap between us and the bottom three, whilst dragging Sheffield United and Man City towards us, it’s always better to look up than down in football.

Well done too to Liverpool, the win over Barca was much deserved. I do have a lot of time for Barca, having had the privilege of going around the stadium and museum, but they don’t half get up their own arses sometimes. At the risk of sounding smug, I did predict a Liverpool win beforehand, simply by virtue of the fact that Barca’s players have been squabbling so much lately.

Not much else to tell, been off work for three days. As much as I love my family (of course), three days of bickering, fighting and arguing is too much for me and I go back to work tomorrow feeling totally unrested, run down and stressed 😦 Never mind, things can only get better.