Bats!'

Once more the weekend arrives. There's so little to do, that I end up staying in bed until 1.30pm, only surfacing when my stomach begins to make more noise than the traffic outside. A bowl of weetabix later, and I'm reclining in front of the television, flicking around in the vain hope that something will grab my interest. Of course the day's best television was at 8am - the British and Irish Lions' first game of their New Zealand tour. But that was far too early. I shall wait until the test matches before getting up that early. If I'm lucky, the rugby club (That's the sport!) will open early, and it will be debauchery before 10am!

I know that this will happen. When England won the world cup in Australia, it started at 8.30am, and about 200 people turned up to watch it at the club. They even opened the bar at 7.30am for the early birds. As you should know, England won, and I doubt I've ever felt so much adrenaline surging through so many people at one time. By 11am, we were all on our way to getting completely smashed. How I managed to stay there until 1am the following morning I'll never know.

But I digress. There I am, watching the England dismiss Bangladesh at the cricket, when the phone rings. It's my friend Simon. He's just phoned to remind me about the bat walk later that evening. I agree to go, as it will probably be the only time I will leave the house all weekend.

We meet at a convenient location, which also happens to be a pub, where we have a meal. I'm most disappointed. I ask for gammon steak, egg and chips. What I get is thick cut ham, with egg, on top of my chips. The rest of the plate, around half, is taken up with salad. Salad!!??!? If I'd wanted half a cesar salad with my chips I'd have asked for it. My sister suggested I should have sent it back, but when you wait for an hour, you tend just to get stuck in.

After a while sitting around, relaxing and chatting, our guide Ian decides it's just about the right time to set off. So we do, and immediately I am glad I made the effort. The meadows are less than a mile from my house, yet I cannot remember ever venturing that far down, even as a child. It was wonderful wandering along the river bank at dusk, and not long before we encountered our first bat.

Ian, who works as a park ranger or something along those lines, bought with him the BatBox III. If you've seen Alien, then it's surprisingly like the motion detectors fashioned by Ash. Whereas his machine detected "micro changes in air density", this identified the frequency of the bats' echolocation signal. Strangely enough, both machines made the same noise when activated.

It was strange. You could walk along these paths, by rivers and near ponds, and never know that there were bats there. But walk around with a bat detector, and you can hear them coming, and also determine from which direction. We must have heard about 30 or so bats with the machine, and made visual contact with at least 15 or so. That may not sound so much, but believe me it was exciting.

All in all, we rambled around for about 90 minutes, the only low point being me putting my foot down a hole and twisting my ankle. Thankfully, we were not too far from our pub base, so hastened back before we got too far into the meadows.

I would honestly urge everyone to do this. It's great fun, and don't be fooled by all those films where bats get caught in your hair. That's really not the case. Remember, these little buggers are flying around dense foliage in the middle of the night, and use echolocation to guide them. They know you're there.

Go on. Treat yourself. It's an experience I want to experience again.

So to Friday. My sister was visiting with her family, and it seemed a good idea for us all to go to the seaside for the day. What could be better? A beautiful sunny June morning, the day off work, and the prospect of messing about on the beach, fish and chips on the promenade in the early evening sunshine.

Off to Ramsgate! And things start off well, weather wise. That is until we reach the river Medway, when it all starts to go tits up, to put it mildly. The Scots have a word for that type of rain the bounces off the ground, stoatin'. "Och jings, it's stoatin'!" The rain was like this for the final 20 or so miles.

Some of you in blogland may have visited Ramsgate. One or two of you may live there, and I'm sure when the sun's out it's a nice enough place. Sadly, the 4 long hours I spent there have not endeared me to the place. Not just because of the rain, which was incessant. But the thunder storm that whimpered the whole time we were there really was a little too much. I once went to Florida for two weeks, and everyday they have electrical storms unparalleled here in Britain. But for all their ferociousness, they do not last long, and within 45 minutes or so, everything is back to normal. Here, it was almost like background noise, so isipid and weak it was.

We sought respite in the local maritime museum, which although small, was actually very interesting. Then we had our fish and chips, in a restaurant staffed entirely by very attractive, but terribly surly, young women. At one point I overheard our waitress address the table of old dears behind us thus "'Ave you lot finished yet?"

I believed at that point both she and I shared the same desire, which was to get out of Ramsgate as soon as possible. The only reason I was able to carry on smiling was I knew I'd be gone before she finished her shift.

And so it was we resigned ourselves to going home, and we arrived back just after 3pm, much to the surprise of friends and family, who'd been enjoying a rare hot day in South East London.

"Why are you back so early?" they inquired, "The weather's lovely outside!"

Today feels like it will be a good day.

Partly because I like Thursdays, and partly because I have tomorrow off work, and am going to the seaside with my sister's family, and my step dad.

I used to hate Thursdays and love Fridays when at school. Thursdays were the long drawn out days that held Friday, and thus the weekend, back. Nowadays, the feelings have transposed. Thursdays are no longer the turgid affair they used to be. Thursdays flash past, and this brings Friday (the weekend) closer quicker.

Sadly, Fridays are now so slow at work, that it feels like we're here two days, even though we finish two hours early. The phones hardly ring, all our customers are based in the Middle East. Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, and their only day off in the week.

I haven't yet decided whether to regularly post here. My life is pretty mundane - get up, go to work, come home, have dinner, watch a bit of tv, go to bed. That's Monday to Friday taken care of. The weekends are only different in that I don't go to work, and don't get out of bed until early afternoon. I'm not sure if this is a sign of depression. Someone intimated this could be the case. I countered that as I live on my own, and am male, that I simply cannot be arsed to get up and do housework.

Lazy slob that I am.

I wanted to start posting on the spur of a good moment. Or on a whim-sy.

But I got bored of waiting.

As I mentioned earlier, this is an occasional thing for me. I was never one to keep a journal or diary. Every year we used to get one from a grandparent, and would earnestly fill in the first few days of January. This was because we were mainly on holiday for New Year, visiting our Scottish relatives.

The Scots always have preferred the New Year holiday to Xmas. My mother told me that up until the 60s in Scotland, Xmas day was only a half day. This is why the Scots have an extra day off at New Year.

So, me and my sister would spend the first 3 or 4 days of that particular new year detailing what we had done that day. Well, detailing is rather misleading. Conciseness, succinctness was the order of the day. "Went to Uncle Pat's. Had dinner. Then to Aunt Anne's. Saw Uncle Frank and cousins. Went home. Went to Bed." A whole day's worth of social interactions, family politics, burgeoning lust and fried bread all condensed into a language even Big Brother would find austere and lifeless.

Still, as soon as we arrived home and returned to school, we ceased detailing the minutae of the day, tossing the diary into some obscure drawer, to be left untouched, unloved and unread for the next 10 years. It was strange when we did rediscover our diaries. My sister was leaving home, to go and live with her boyfriend, and she found it in a drawer, covered with childhood stuffed animals.

Reading the entries, in her neat, italic handwriting, brought back many tearful memories. Silently reading the few entries, it suddenly hit us that in the 8 years that had passed, half the people mentioned during that week had since died. Our father was one, his brother another. Neither of them had reached 40. Eldery relatives had also passed on, and as sad as it was they had died, they all had had good innings. None was younger than 75.

And here I am, 13 years after that discovery, finally getting around to writing my own blog. As I mention somewhere, I'm not publishing this blog for approval, nor for sympathy, simply because I want to. And I can.

In those 13 years, the number of people who have passed on has remained constant, only this time one of the fallen was my mother. She was only 57, and died from cancer. The big C. How I hate that disease. It makes you feel so helpless. By the end, she weighed just 6 stone, and there I was, a hulking great presence (22 stone or thereabouts), unable to stop what was happening. Totally and utterly useless.

Oh well, I've had enough today.