Once again I’m here in a freezing office hoping an oil tanker will turn up this morning. Actually as I write the tanker has turned up, however the system still isn’t working because we now need to wait for the plumber to arrive to bleed the tank. I woke up this morning at 3am, and of course I have been awake since. I did have to very strange dreams though. In the first one I was on a plane flying to Liverpool, only not as a passenger, I was the pilot! During the flight one of the passengers asked me if the plane could fly as far as Russia. Yes I said and altered course for Russia. Unfortunately I must have taken a wrong turning along the way and ended up crashing the plane in Poland. Well nobody died although the passengers who had booked to fly to Liverpool were not best pleased. In my second dream, I came on as a substitute for Liverpool in an FA cup final at Wembley against Sunderland. There was only two minute left when I came on and I never got a kick. None-the-less, no one was able to say I didn’t play a blinder.

Now there are many ways of beating the system. Here are a couple. A chap in Northern Ireland had difficulty in getting the bin men to remove all his rubbish. He found having about six bins for various materials confusing, and often ended up placing rubbish in the wrong bins. That is until he had a brain wave. Once his dust bin became full, he wrapped the rest of his rubbish in fancy Christmas paper and some bugger nicked it every time.

Junk mail is a huge problem for many of us. A friend of mine in London got so fed up of the junk mail he was receiving that he took himself off to the local butcher, and got a load of chicken’s guts. He then left the guts to rot for a couple of weeks before posting them back to his junk mail senders. It soon stopped.

Well the cold has beaten me once again so I am now off down stairs to the electric fire.

Tom Glassey, still freezing on the banks of the Silverburn River.