Don’t you just hate it when all your best-laid plans go out of the window?

As Claire and I are both off work this week, we decided to use one of our days away from the ward/office, to tackle the mess in our garage.

When we moved into our house in 2017, anything we spotted that we didn’t want in the new property was boxed up and stored in the garage. This included things which would be better placed on a charity shop shelf, or in most cases, the bottom of a giant skip at the city rubbish dump.

There have also been a very small number of my possessions, that I haven’t seen since the house move. I hope that I will find my prized assets – which include a DVD recording I made, of a Leeds match against Bolton in 2004, which saw them relegated – but this is almost literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this…

I think there is a pizza delivery boy lost in here somewhere *

* See yesterday’s blog for that reference.

Now do you see why it might be difficult to locate a single DVDR?

We gave up on the garage organisation, before we had even begun.

Considering it was just Claire and me available to clear the entire contents of the garage, not forgetting that I am wired into my mobility scooter or wheelchair, it was going to be an impossible task to do on our own.

I remember playing Tetris in the 1990s, so thought that experience might have come in handy, when it came to organising the boxes.

Then I remembered that we would initially be taking stuff out of the garage, whereas Teteis, of course, focuses on incoming blocks.

We both concluded that we will need help and ideally someone with access to a car, who can get to the rubbish dump, doesn’t mind moving boxes and isn’t scared of some fecking huge spiders. From what Claire has told me, the arachnids in our garage have been pumping some serious iron and eating steroids for breakfast.

I’ve already nominated my Dad. He’s currently living it up in Cornwall, so I don’t want to tell him the news just yet. It’ll be a nice surprise for when he arrives home from his holiday.

The second failure of the day involved our evening meal. It has been seriously hot today. Claire, Roman and I have been suffering with the high temperatures all week and are getting a little fed up – when will this heatwave nightmare end?

When it got to tea time, Claire declared that she didn’t want to eat, as she was far too hot. While I thought the idea of going to bed without consuming anything, apart from a packet of Chilli Heatwave Doritos, was notbthe best idea ever thought up, I was in full agreement with my wife, that turning on the oven and increasing the air temperature in our house even more, was a savagely cruel thought.

Oh, and yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy of complaining about the heat, while eating a spicy corn-based snack.

After giving it much thought, we decided that the only food we could eat, without causing ourselves to spontaneously combust, was McDonalds. Probably because food from Maccy D’s, especially once you get it home, is nearly always luke warm. Nobody has ever burnt their tongue on a potato fry, or needed a skin-graft on their lips, after biting into a scorching hot McChicken Sandwich.

The only reason we even considered a takeaway, is because McDonald’s now deliver, saving Claire the effort of driving across town, in a modern ‘hunter gatherer’ type of role.

Upon choosing our meal, we were about to pay – only to be told that they were no longer taking orders. Presumably, at some point between logging onto Uber Eats, adding our food to the basket and checking out, the delivery driver had decided not to take any more orders. I was Uber annoyed!

Still, these things happen , I told myself, after I had calmed down from a huge rant, where I used words no Netherland Dwarf rabbit should hear – sorry, Roman!

Claire and I were therefore prepared to give Uber Eats another chance. We kept refreshing the list of takeaway restaurants on the Uber homepage, hoping for McDonald’s to become available again. After half an hour of trying – yes, we were that desperate – it appeared…

Never have we been so excited about the prospect of a cheese dipper and Flake McFlurry. We had to fill the shopping basket with our order again and enter all the necessary payment details – all this being done at lightning speed, as we didn’t want to miss out again.

When it came to sending the payment and confirming the order, this happened…

No swear word would give justice to how we felt.