2010 Lottery Emails Omnibus

Each week I send an email to members of the lottery syndicate. I sometimes include a joke or observation, and I usually assign myself a joke middle name. These are my names from 2010:

Mon 04/01/2010
Richard "2010" B

Mon 11/01/2010
Richard "broken combi-boiler" B

Mon 18/01/2010
Richard "Third date tonight" B

Mon 01/02/2010
Richard "rhinovirus" B

Mon 15/02/2010
Richard "Weekend Rock Star" B

Mon 22/02/2010
Richard "guiro" B

Mon 01/03/2010
Richard "stewards' enquiry" B

Mon 15/03/2010
A week when I didn't ejoy being swabbed at the sexual health clinic (purely precautinary, all clear)
Richard 'Richie "cotton-bud" B' B

Mon 22/03/2010
For the sake of easy copying and pasting from the new lottery records system, this email is now in html format. If you have problems reading it, or have deep philosophical objections to html emails, then please let me know, preferably with a procedure for extracting column data from excel into plain text.
Richard '51.9mpg' B

Mon 29/03/2010
Richard 'least said soonest mended' B

Tue 06/04/2010
Richard 'single' B

Mon 12/04/2010
Richard 'luthier' B

Mon 19/04/2010
Richard 'the hungover house-painter' B

Mon 19/04/2010
Richard "couldn’t organize a lottery syndicate in an IT company" B

Mon 26/04/2010
Richard 'man-and-van' B

Tue 27/04/2010 09:34
At the beginning of this week I sent the lottery email with the wrong balances. If you compare the balances I sent earlier this week with last week's you will see they are the same (with the exception of Rob and Dee who both made payments last week.) As always it is the paper record which really counts, the email is just to help you keep up to date, or in the case of the last 2 weeks, to confuse and mislead you.
On the plus side, I now know how to turn off "compose emails using word" in outlook.
Richard "not very good with excel" B

Tue 04/05/2010
Richard 'never drinking again (until at least Wednesday)' B

Mon 10/05/2010
Richard 'No We're not gonne f---ing do "Stonehenge" tomorrow' B

Mon 17/05/2010
Richard 'Good with children' B

Tue 01/06/2010
Richard 'New Dining Table' B

Mon 07/06/2010
Richard 'moth balls' B

Mon 14/06/2010
The week I repaired a cymbal using the headstock of a pillar drill
Richard 'home-made lathe' B

Mon 21/06/2010
Richard 're-ablement care nurse' B

Mon 28/06/2010
The week that I saw my friend Sarah's debut in the philharmonic choir
Richard 'Saturday night out at the Catholic Cathedral' B

Mon 12/07/2010
Richard "my boiler's bust" B

Wed 14/07/2010
Richard "off to buy the tickets" B

Mon 19/07/2010
After I first played Fleetwood Mac's 'The Chain' correctly
Richard "Lindsey Buckingham" B

Mon 02/08/2010
Richard "I never knew there were so many options when you buy a tambourine" B

Tue 10/08/2010
Richard "Rain Soaked Holiday" B

Tue 31/08/2010
Richard "Don't close the front door after you've taken the handle to bits" B

Mon 06/09/2010
Richard "tour bus to Honiton" B

Mon 13/09/2010
After coming second in a quiz which had been specifically designed so that our team couldn't win.
Richard "pub quiz runner up" B

Mon 20/09/2010
Richard "missed the last bus home" B

Mon 27/09/2010
Richard "my supposedly luxurious Sunday night bath ended up with red wine and fag ash in it" B

Mon 04/10/2010
Richard "stud................. partition wall" B

Mon 18/10/2010
Richard "'paint the cabinets in a small fitted kitchen' could have been one of the labours of Hercules" B

Mon 15/11/2010
Richard "wedding cake for breakfast" B

Mon 22/11/2010
Richard "'Imagine' isn't even a Beatles song*" B
* Yes, I admit it, I'm watching "The X Factor" this year.

Mon 06/12/2010
Richard "No heating, serious fire hazard. Pick one" B
If anybody's interested in my middle name this week. All the downstairs sockets in my house are on the same circuit breaker, and it includes the boiler, the gas stove, and the kitchen extractor fan. The only way I can coax the boiler in to life at the moment is to have the mains connections for the stove and the cooker hood disconnected from their fuses and switches. Basically my house can be dangerous and warm, or cold and safe. Which would you choose?

Wed 15/12/2010
Richard "Spirit of Christmas yet to come" B

12 year dry spell

In the late 90s an article by Chris Morris (I think) mentioned the only 2 acceptable names for tribute bands: "The Pretend Pretenders" and "Sham Sham 69". Within a few weeks my friends and I had also come up with "The Mock Mock Turtles", and since then we haven't been able to think of another one. In fact I cross-referenced a thesaurus with a Guinness book of British Hit Singles and convinced myself that there wasn't another one. This weekend, to my amazement and deligh, my friend Keith came up with "The Vanessa Paradis Parody". I urge you not to spend the next ten or fifteen years trying to think of names of bands that contain synonyms for counterfeit.

OK very well done. "The Charlatan Charlatans"

Richard "Never drinking again" B

Public entertainment is impossible

At the weekend my band was playing at the Cherry Tree. I played guitar for over 2 hours and made only a couple of mistakes. I played the Jeff Beck guitar part in "Superstition" without error, and more impressively I played the John Squire part from "Love is the Law" without a mistake while a drunken audience member played tambourine loudly out of time. However what I got a round of applause (and several congratulations) for, was tripping over a loudspeaker and landing flat on my face before the show even started.

Richard "no sex, no drugs, some rock'n'roll" B

Most unlikely experience from my holiday

I received a glancing blow to the side of the head from a low flying vulture at a falconry display.

I also had to buy public liability insurance to be able to play at a wedding.

Richard "public liability" B

Worst commute this year

As well as getting stuck behind a dithering old person, and a van that would barely fit through the country lanes, a little bit of my dinner escaped in my bag and made its way into one of my shoes (also in my bag).

Richard "Tupperware failure" B

Best Thing I've Read In Ages

Giles Smith in his book "Lost In Music" is talking about Noddy Holder and Marc Bolan:

In those days it was either T. Rex or it was Slade. The whole history of pop seemed to have boiled down to this crucial axis. Actually history seemed to have boiled down to this crucial axis. The industrial unrest of the early 1970's? It was just background hum during the Slade vs. T. Rex chart wars or 1972/73. ..... After the Boy/Girl distinction Slade or T. Rex was the easiest way to divide the people I knew at school. Clearly much was encoded in this choice. Were you a team player, responding to the garrulous network that was Slade, or were you an individualist, smitten by Bolan's singularity? Did you like boys who looked like girls, or boys who looked like Victorian factory owners?

Richard "working musicians are under-paid" B

Joke

What's the temperature in Motown?

3 degrees, maybe 4, tops.

Richard "guiro" B

Too funny a story not to share

I was at a birthday party on Friday night, drinking with several of my friends and some more distant aquaintances. I have always rather liked one of the girls called Booby Redacted (she looks like a little elf with a pair of watermellons up her shirt). I asked her out on a date, she readily accepted and gave me her phone number. About 20 minutes later (during which time we hadn't been talking to one another) she said that she'd changed her mind, and had me delete her phone number.

I also accidentally went out drinking hard while wearing a suit.

Richard 'The new birdman' B

Tunnocks

To celebrate my win on the lottery bonus ball, I have bought in excess of 1/100,000 of the weekly production of Tunnocks caramel wafers. I'm putting them in the kitchen for you to enjoy. Help yourselves.

Richard "saturated fats" B

Date Report 7

[Email. Richard Bredacted -> San Fransisco Judy. 13th January 2010]
I can't believe that you would casually ask me "What's new" this week. I had the weirdest weekend, and I took a woman out on what is probably the worst date in history:

I've been casually seeing a woman called Redacted for about 3 months. We were getting on very well, going out for meals and drinks, staying at one another's house occasionally. We stayed in together on New Year's Eve. On Saturday I took Redacted to the cinema, and then for some food. We went to the bar under the restaurant for a drink. In walked my ex-girlfriend Ex (The one I brought to visit you, the one that I always think was most important). Ex came over and started chatting to both of us. There was obviously some of the old chemistry left, and it turns out that Ex is living in Plymouth and is single. Redacted and I left the bar and walked to another place. Redacted was a bit shaken at how well Ex and I had been getting on (she showed us her new heart operation scars) and I was completely freaked out that she was back in Plymouth. I haven't had anything to do with her in about 5 years, and hadn't really thought about her in most of that time.

At the second bar I finished my relationship with Redacted so that I could go back to the first bar and ask Ex on a date. Of course by the time I got back there she had already left. Thankfully we had exchanged telephone numbers, and she returned my call the next day. To say that Ex was shocked at what I had done is an understatement, but she agreed to go out for a meal with me on Monday, and we're going out again on Friday. Friday's date was her choice, and so I'm going to be taking her "heavy drinking". That used to be my favourite, but I'm completely out of practice now.


[Email. Richard Bredacted -> The Penny Pincher. 12th January 2010]
Pretty successful, all things considered.

We got on very well, chatting easily, laughing and joking, lots of reminiscing, tiny bit of flirting (I said it was the best first date ever because I was out with a beautiful woman, and even if it went nowhere, then I've still already seen her naked).

What was nice to hear is that when she looks back she always thinks that our relationship was the important one, like I do.

The problem is that she was completely cut up by what happened at the end, and she's never really got her confidence back, she blames me for the last several years of her life being pretty crappy. Moreover, since her latest operation she thinks that she looks so funny that she hasn't let a man anywhere near her.

We agreed that if anything is going to happen it's got to happen very slowly and cautiously, but we also agreed (and shook hands) to not go out with anybody else while we were finding out. I'm taking her out heavy drinking on Friday night, and we're going home separately to our own seperate houses.

I was compelled make a completely off colour joke: We had disgusting lemon liqueur after the meal. The waitress asked if we liked it and I said "not really". The waitress looked down into my empty glass and said "but you managed to force it down your throat?". Before I realized what I was doing I said to the waitress "Yes, and I'll be doing that to her later". Thankfully the waitress was so professional that she pretended not to hear me, and Ex thought it was funny.

[Email. Richard Bredacted -> San Fransisco Judy. 14th January 2010]
Redacted is pretty upset and was crying on Sunday, but she's not completely in pieces about it and she does appreciate my openness and honesty. It wasn't very nice for her, but when we broke up she had heard every word that I had spoken to Ex in the last 5 years and I had done absolutely nothing behind her back. When I told her that I was finishing it so that I could go back and ask Ex on the date, I didn't even know what Ex was going to say. I'm still on speaking terms with her, and we hope to remain friends. We're still going to a concert together on Sunday.

The date with Ex was mixed. We got on easily and were laughing and joking and flirting. However she was completely cut up by what happened when we finished. She blames me for destroying her self-confidence, and pretty much ruining the last 5 years. She's also had another heart operation, and she thinks that the scar looks so funny that she hasn't let a man near her since. We agreed that if anything is going to happen between us it'll be done slowly and cautiously, and that we're not going to leap into bed together. She agreed that we need to find out if it's salvageable, and we shook hands on the idea that we wouldn't go out with anybody else until we had made that decision. I'm taking her out heavy drinking on a second date on Friday. I'm already nervous about it.

[Email. Richard Bredacted -> San Fransisco Judy. 25th January 2010]
Everything is pretty much as you guessed. On the night of the heavy-drinking date we were back at my house by 10.00 and spend most of the weekend in bed. Much more excitingly we've had another couple of less physical dates, and some long talks, and we're going to try to make a go of our relationship all over again. As of Saturday we are nominally boyfriend and girlfriend. I'm really excited and blissfully infatuated.