As I have nothing to report this morning*

I thought I would direct readers here cos it's funny.

* Except an addition to my story of the 'Unfortunate coincidence.' Unbelievably, our so called friend is meeting the 'Match.com quality controller'. I am quite shocked.

Oh, and there is actually something new on Just Jane.

I feel lost

You will know the feeling when you have been reading a really superb book, and you can't put it down, but you don't really want to finish it either because it is giving you so much pleasure.

Last night I finished C.J. Sansom's Dark Fire. If I tell you this is a book based around a lawyer in Tudor London who has a hunchback it may not sound overly inviting, but what a great, great read it is.

Sansom has written three books about his lawyer Matthew Shardlake. I picked up the first one 'Dissolution' by sheer chance having noticed a little recommendation by a someone who worked in a local book shop. This one was about murderous monks and I enjoyed it well enough to read 'Sovereign' which is around how far rebels in the north of England were prepared to go to challenge the legitimacy of the Tudor's claim to the throne of England, as well as how Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine Howard headed towards tragedy. Now that is a brilliant read, and I couldn't wait to get hold of 'Dark Fire'.

'Dark Fire' is actually the middle one in the series and involves events some factual and some fiction, leading to Henry's marriage to Catherine Howard and the fall of Thomas Cromwell. There is lots of intrigue, mystery, and danger, but what sets these books apart is Sansom's ability to bring Tudor England to life. This one is based in the City of London and it manages to perfectly capture the sights, sounds, smells and attitudes of life at that time. He brings in the politics of the day, as well as the confusion the ordinary people experienced as one religious edict was contradicted by another: "What, in order to best avoid a charge of blasphemy, am I supposed to believe this week?" And Shardlake has a moral conscience and is angered by - for example - poverty, slum housing, and the threat posed by the 'WMD' of his day - the Dark Fire referred to in the title.

So what more do I have to say here to persuade people to read these wonderful books? Reidski incidentally thinks they sound like utter 'pish' but he has no taste. He does after all go out with me!

How was it for you?

The earth certainly moved for me. 1.05am and following my rude awakening I was outside with a torch seeing if my roof was still on the house. And yes, I did hear birds singing at that time of the night.

Mott The Hoople - Roll Away The Stone

Never let it be said my blog is all cobblers. This post at least is superb :-)

An unfortunate coincidence.

So last night my sister and I travel 40 miles to a friend's house for the evening. My sister, as previously mentioned, is unlucky in love. If she falls for someone my mum and I now know immediately that the person she has fallen for is a dodgy double dealer at best, and a complete and utter cunt at worst.

My sister wasted 18 precious years of her life on one of the world's major league bastards, for reasons that no one who knew her and him have ever been able to fathom. It was at least four years after they finally split up before she could even think about looking at another man.

Now it is a fact that most of the single men round these parts would give their eye teeth to take her out, not to mention several of the married ones as well, but she isn't interested in them, preferring instead to take out an advert in Match.com saying "Blonde, 40 something, looking for total shit bag to make my life miserable." (Or something along those lines.) And on several occasions she has struck gold so far as locating total shit bags is concerned.

Alarm bells therefore rang in my head when she confessed she recently had a date with a man via Match.com who she had found she really liked. He had made her laugh in e-mail exchanges by saying he was a quality controller for Match.com. charged with taking out women who were yet to find true love through the web site and compensating them with a champagne filled evening.(That worried me too - how could she possibly be amused by anything that naff?) They met and seemed to get on really well, but then there was a long silence from his side during which she became quite fraught ("Why do the ones I like never call?"), but then he took her out again a week ago. Once again they got on really well. They arranged another date; albeit it not for a further four weeks, which seemed a little odd if they were both so keen.

So back to last night. There were 5 of us women sat around the table chatting, drinking and eating couscous (delicious). Our hostess then asked my sister how it was going with this man, who incidentally lives in Kettering. G explained that it was all very odd, and how they seemed to get on really well, but dates were few and far between. This is probably the moment where I should mention it was our friend who had persuaded my sister to try Match.com. as she also uses it. "Well" says our friend, "I have been chatting to a guy from Kettering. He seems quite good fun. He reckons to be a quality controller for Match.com."


A tumbleweed moment then occurred as what exactly she had just said sank in with me and my sister.

And yes, it is of course one and the same man.

Another potential love affair bit the dust.

I think they might actually have a bit of fun at his expense before revealing to him what they have learnt.

But how unlucky is that man? What I wonder were the chances that he would contact two women, living 40 miles from each other, who just happen to be very good friends?


UPDATE: Our friend is meeting this man on Sunday. Is it just me, or is that a really strange thing for a 'friend' to do? My sister is pretending to her she doesn't mind but....

I am enjoying this whilst it lasts.

OK - it is unlikely to last beyond 5.00 this eveing, but as things stand right now.....


WE ARE ON THE SAME POINTS AS LEEDS U-BLOODY- NITED!!!!!*


Coca-Cola Football League One Table
22 February 2008 21:56
P GD PTS
1 Swansea 32 35 70
2 Doncaster 31 20 56
3 Nottm Forest 31 23 53
4 Carlisle 30 13 52
5 Tranmere 33 8 51
6 Walsall 32 11 49
7 Leyton Orient 33 -4 49
8 Southend 32 3 47
9 Leeds 32 23 46
10 Northampton 34 0 46
11 Oldham 31 6 43
12 Swindon 31 5 43
13 Huddersfield 31 -12 43
14 Brighton 30 5 42
15 Yeovil 33 -10 41
16 Bristol Rovers 29 1 40
17 Hartlepool 33 0 40
18 Cheltenham 33 -19 35
19 Crewe 32 -18 34
20 Millwall 32 -17 33
21 Gillingham 31 -19 32
22 Luton 32 -13 24
23 Bournemouth 33 -17 22
24 Port Vale 33 -24 22


* Please don't look at the goal difference though; that would only spoil things for me :-)

Flimsy defences of our time

Pub chef: 'I regret having sex with body of dead model'. Yes, I am sure he does.

One of those cases where I can't help but wonder why we go to all the time and effort of providing a trial in the first place. I know that 'presumed innocent until found guilty' is an important pillar of our legal system, but if this bastard's best line of defence is "I happened to find a dead woman lying there and had sex with her" I would venture to suggest he is guilty as charged.

Also on the subject of flimsy defences Steven Wright has unsurprisingly been found guilty of murdering 5 women in Ipswich.

He was confronted by things he claimed were just coincidences - the fact he had picked up all five women at around the time they disappeared, the fact that he did so in the same order they disappeared, the fact his partner Pam was out on each of the nights they went missing. I am all in favour of the occasion coincidence myself (I do after all love the novels of Jane Austen) but that lot plus the DNA evidence would seem to suggest that his defence team in considering an appeal won't need to dwell on that subject very long.



P.S. The jury came back after three and a half hours and found Mark Dixie guilty. I wonder what they all talked about for the three hours 25 minutes after they had all said "Yes of course the bastard did it."

Day trip

I took my daughter (from now on to be known as OD on this blog - 'Only Daughter') to London for the day. She had been on at me to take her without actually seeming able to tell me what she wanted to do when we got there. I kept looking at theatre tickets but either there didn't seem to be any available, or prices were prohibitive. Both of us had previously seen Billy Elliott, although not together. I went with Reidski and then went on about it at length here. We had both absolutely loved it. Anyway, to cut a long story down to size - I managed to get what appeared to be the last 2 tickets for it at the very last minute. I was led to believe we would be sitting at the back of the second circle, but I was sure we would still be able to see something; I have after all only recently got a new prescription for my contact lenses. Anyway, O.D's delight made every moment of hassle obtaining them totally worth while.

So we did some girly shopping first comprising of H&M (purchases made - O.D), Cos (no purchases made), Top Shop (no purchases made though many eye brows raised at some of the items on sale which brought home to me that I am indeed getting old) and Zara (purchase made - me). And then to Victoria where I went to the box office to collect the tickets for what I assumed were the worst seats in the theatre. I thought it was lucky that of the three box office windows I ended up at the one that just happened to have my tickets right there, and thought it was a little odd they didn't have my name on. We went up to the top circle and showed our tickets to the doorman, who pointed out our tickets were for the circle below. So here, for what it is worth is Jane's theory on buying last minute tickets. I have decided the sellers of these do not allocate specific tickets to named persons. I think they must sell a certain number, and it is totally random which ones you actually get when you collect them. In fact our seats turned out to be really good, and this has happened to Reidski and I before too.


After the show I took O.D for a meal at an Italian chain called Strada. I ordered a pizza and it looked simply perect on arrival - only it wasn't. On first bite it was hardly warm, let alone hot. Dilemma time! For one thing, O.D being a typical 14 year old girl, is mortified by the thought that anything might draw attention to us and I knew she was likely to hate me complaining. But for another - I don't like upsetting anyone - especially not waiters as I know from past experience what a shit job it can be. But the pizza was not of the tempertaure where I could really just put up and shut up and eat up, so I very quietly mentioned the fact to a staff member. A new (and very delicious) pizza was produced. Three different people took the time to come and apologise to me, and it wasn't as if they weren't busy; but in addition, when the bill came they had knocked 20% off which I certainly had not expected. So - good on Strada. I am quick to moan to others about rubbish service so I wanted to highlight how well they responded to a problem.

And now back to normality - work beckons.

Football chants

Never let it be said that I ignore the important issues in this world, and with that in mind I want tonight to talk to you about football chants.

As can be seen here Reidski, (who IS really annoying in his flat refusal to ever critise referees) thinks the worst football chant is "Your support is fucking shit" (usually aimed at home supporters), closely followed by "You don't know what you're doing" (usually aimed at the referee but can be aimed at a manager following an inexplicable substitution).

"Wanker, wanker" is an odd one. Always meant as a term of abuse aimed by a bunch of men at one isngle male, but which one amongst the chanters has never....never mind.

Now when we Cobblers are abroad (by 'abroad' I mean places as diverse as Swindon, Hartlepool and Oldham) we are a noisy lot. At home however it is often the case that "our support is fucking shit." Last Saturday the Gillingham fans (poor unfortunates that they were) sang at us "4-0 and you still don't sing." Although in fairness that was due to us all suffering from a collective case of deep shock.

My worst chant by many miles is the truly idiotic and asking for grief - "Easy, easy," especially when we are only 1-0 up.

I like ones where a player's name lends itself to a certain chant...our captain Chris Doig is greeted by "Who let the Doig out?" and our new cult hero Adebayo Akinfenwa (four goals in three games and he has yet to play a whole match) has already earnt "Bayo, Baaaaayoo."

But the best are the ones that reflect gallows humour and I will end this for now with the reaction of the Gillingham fans when their player Thurgood went in with a late tackle and caught our player... A few Cobblers fans started chanting "OFF, OFF, OFF", so they just joined in. As one commented later "Three games without him would be fantastic."

Open House

Well I don't know about anyone else but I am sick and tired of this signing in performance and so I hearby declare this blog well and truly open.


How so very ever - I know I have to be more careful about what I write and so I have revived my old blog but made that invite only. Everyone who was an invited reader of this during what will now only be referred to as 'The Crisis' which led to me disappearing underground has access to it and once it is tidied up - it looks a RIGHT state - anything that could identify me will be over there. If anyone else wants an in to the other stuff- e-mail me at cobblerjane@yahoo.co.uk.

The other blog can be found at www.justjanentfc69.blogspot.com.

There will of necessity be a bit of chopping and changing before this is all sorted sufficent to ease my paranoid mind, but please stick with me!

F.F's.S

Awoken by the phone. Son on way to work ringing to say he has gone into a bollard and car is fucked. A combination of heavy frost and a low sun dazzling him resulted in him being in need of a new car. I bare in mind that it is 'only a car' and no one is hurt.

Then follows much aggro what with trying to borrow a tow rope, and then getting his car back.

After all this I return home and as I walk into my kitchen I ask myself "Why is there water all over the floor?" Answer - Because fridge freezer is defrosting and is on the blink.

"What?" I ask Reidski via the phone, "will go wrong next?" (for as we know, troubles always come in threes).

I ring off and put the phone in my pocket. I go for a wee. I provide the answer to my own question when the phone slips out of my pocket and into the toilet.



I guess this must be pay back for the tremendous afternoon I had yesterday watching my lot demolish Gillingham. Sorry Cookie, but your lot were woeful.

Never let the facts

get in the way of a story with which to beat social workers.

This is a horrific case of a baby girl who was abused and murdered by her father and it happened in my area.

Up to 30 medical workers saw her but took no actions which could have saved her - like for example inform social services of their concerns. However, as you will see from the Daily Mail, the fault for this poor child's death is placed fully at the feet of social services workers...even though we knew nothing at all about her until after she had been killed.

Reidski is so right about journalists.

STOP PRESS: Obviously I wasn't the only one offended and it has been changed.

The previous headline was: How 30 social services workers allowed a sadistic father to murder his 54-day-old baby girl.

I love a movie quiz

And this one is especially entertaining ;-)

No Country For Old Men

We saw this yesterday. Positively the only time a Coen Brothers film has given me the kind of nightmares I had last night.

This passage in the review has leapt off the screen for me....

The Coens are true to the pessimistic severity of the book's ending - darker, arguably, than the ending of McCarthy's great novel The Road, to whose horror this story can, in retrospect, be seen to be heading.

By this am I to understand the very book I am currently reading (Cormac McCarthy - The Road) will not be providing me with a nice and cosy happy ending?

Think yourselves lucky

that I have to be out in a few minutes which restricts my ability to rant about the greedy fucking bastards at the Premier League who believe "This is an idea whose time has come".

This from a group of pampered teams who already complain about their players having to go on overseas on international duty during the season, and who are on record as saying they play too many games as it is.

That it will come to pass I have no doubt...to merry hell with the fans who have sustained these clubs throughout so many years....Hong Kong here we come. And as to the slight difficulty that it would be unfair for the likes of say Derby County to end up playing Man Utd 3 times in a season and therefore almost certainly facing an enhanced threat of relegation? Well that is easily solved isn't it? No more relegation from the premiership.


Anyway, who needs Premiership football? You can see from this picture the lengths some people will go to to watch Northampton Town these days.



Anyone would think we were playing a 'Big Team' yesterday - like Leeds United or some such side?

We went for a walk

on Thursday evening. It was a walk with a very entertaining guide,and he took a group of us round London's Inns of Court. In very many ways this was a fascinating walk. For a start, it is hard to believe until you see with your own eyes how many beautiful buildings and gardens are hidden away right in the heart of the city. As someone who is also really into history, it is always amazing to be told things like "Oliver Cromwell's office was here." And I like Charles Dickens too, so it was great to have Bleak House brought to life.

What will stick longest in my mind though about this walk was the fact that of a group consisting of about 30 people, a grand total of 7 of us managed not to have got lost within the first 40 yards. A search party had to be despatched to find those who proved incapable of following a bloke who was at least 6 foot 2 and wearing a silly hat with a very loud and commanding voice down a straight road for 40 yards without taking a wrong turning. Their boss, for it was a walk organised through Reidski's work, was on the verge of sacking the lot of them on the grounds of mass incompetence.

I don't know why

there is a copy of Monday's Daily Star in my front room, but I blame the teenagers. Still, it was fun to read a two page spread on Grange Hill which begins "Grange Hill is celebrating 30 years and is still going strong with a new series due to kick off soon."

Two days later and as all we Brits know this, as reported in the Daily Star with no mention of the article they produced 48 hours before, happens.

I have the most enormous spot.

It is about an inch to the right of my lips.

It has been here since Monday and shows no sign whatsoever of moving on.

I am not happy!

Spot Update: Monday 11th February.

Spot still going strong. I am becoming The Incredible Spot.

Wednesday already?

Well my team won the quiz on Friday. Winning is always nice - not that we do it that often, but Friday's victory was exceedingly sweet. We were playing The Untouchables. That is the polite name for this particular team in which four persons are always present, but only two ever answer; a husband and wife who know absolutely everything, but far worse that that - take the whole village quiz thing Very Seriously. They have completely altered what used to be a fun evening out to one that is tense and unpleasant since they started 'playing'. But on Friday - apart from an alegbra round over which I prefer to draw a veil - everything went right for us, and we didn't just beat them by a little bit. We were The Destroyers of The Untouchables. And it isn't just us that doesn't like them as was well evidenced by the massive cheer we got when the results were read out.

The Untouchables are the ones who knowing a round was coming up on motorway service stations researched the sodding things in advance. And when baby sitters go round pre quiz they hear them testing each other with general knowledge questions.

I feel I have to mention again that we are talking here about a silly little village quiz.


Also, on Sunday Reidski and I arrived late for the quiz at his local and even though there was an entire round on science - SO not our subject - we finished that a respectable fourth.... and I hasten to add that not all the other teams were as dumb as the four American girls whose sheet we were marking. There is something very depressing in realising that when four Americans are asked " Ottawa is the capital of which country?" not one of them can come up with the answer.

Various things that are mainly too good to be true.

First of all – thanks to everyone who has commented in the past few days. I will respond properly, but where I am at the moment I can’t get on the blog to do so and I know I will struggle to get on the computer at home till early next week. I have been trying to find out if what my bastard landlord is up to is actually legal, but how a Citizen ever manages to get advice from Citizens Advice, seeing as how they never actually answer their phones, I am sure I don’t know.

Hope everyone has had a good week

What with it having just been January I have been full of good intentions and have practically moved in to my gym these past few weeks. In fact I have just counted up and I have attended no fewer than 24 classes in the past month. A total world record for me – but I have to admit that the vast majority of those have been 15 minute Power plate sessions I have been going to them during lunchtimes but I really couldn’t decide if they were doing any good or if I was the victim of a giant confidence trick in my belief that just 15 minutes of an exercise session in which I hardly break sweat can possibly be doing any good whatsoever. The words “Too good to be true” kept playing in my head. In fact I was on the verge of saying “Waste of time” when a woman I was chatting to declared her body was transformed after just 6 weeks of regular power plate sessions. Therefore I vibrate on – for the time being at least.

I also had a few attempts at astanga yoga but decided it was boring. Or to be slightly more honest, I persuaded myself it was boring because I was the only beginner in a class where every other sod could turn themselves inside out, and by my calculations it would take me the rest of my life plus several years to get to where they all are now. Yes, I admit it – I don’t like being crap, and so it is back to the aerobics class for me - which it just so happens I am rather good at!

I was telling a neighbour how many times I had been to the gym recently. “Well” she replied, “I am training for a triathlon.” Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Football – and after a stunning display last Friday which was frankly too good to be true, Reidski came up on Tuesday to witness a distinctly mediocre one when we played Brighton. That we won leads me to assume there must have been a mass planting of four leafed clovers on our pitch. We were lucky, lucky bastards. Best bit was when one of their players went over in the penalty area and supporters all around us were on their feet baying for him to be booked for diving as appeals by Brighton for a penalty were waved away. As the Brighton player was indeed booked for telling the referee what he thought of his decision making, the baying supporters around us sat back down all agreeing “Cast iron penalty.” As indeed it was.

And having been SO good all month, when Reidski came up again last night we went for a steak. There is this very nice gastro pub near where I live, but it is expensive which means I hardly ever go there. Anyway, I drive past it at least twice a day, and all through January they had a sign up saying “ Two steak meals and a bottle of wine £19.95.” “Like power plates,” thinks I. “Too good to be true.” But it wasn’t. It was absolutely true and not a single catch to be found in any small print, so a very lovely meal indeed was devoured.


(Bit deleted and sent to the Other Place)

Well I don’t know the answer to that one, but hope I will know at least some of the answers in our village quiz in which I take part tonight, and indeed at Reidski’s pub quiz which I will be taking part in on Sunday.

I am going to have a lovely weekend – I hope you all do too.