I knew this would happen! I haven't been out as my female alter-ego Penny since November and am beginning to get the need. Tonight I got an invitation from Ashley who has been a good friend to me now for three and a half years. She's arranging a night out; great! 23rd Feb...damn, I can't make it. I can't really complain though as it's half term and I'm taking the children skiing for the second time in their lives, and that rates way above a night out en-femme. I'll just have to find another time to do that.

"There is more to life!" That's the theme to this blog, or is supposed to be. We are born, we live but for a short blip in the vastness of time and space and then we're worm food. Carpe diem and all that. So now I sense that a new experience is beckoning to me, one that several of my contemporaries at school tried over twenty years ago. I'm that far behind them! I'm seriously contemplating sampling magic mushrooms. I have not finished Andy Letcher's book, but already I am bewitched, enchanted and captivated. In order to follow this through, I'll have to overcome a number of obstacles. First, I'll have to obtain some psilocybin mushrooms, secondly, I'll have to find some personal time to try them out, away from wife and kids and thirdly, I'll have to overcome my own natural disinclation to take drugs. This last obstacle may yet defeat me. You see, there are thousands of ways to get a buzz in life and the truth is, most of them do not require pharmacological assistance.

Some of the most potent and best suited drugs are manufactured by our own bodies; adrenalin, endorphins etc. which can be provoked by all kinds of things. I won't elaborate here as there are literally thousands of scholarly articles all over the internet about how to get an upper or downer without popping a pill. I'm not addicted to sport, but exercise really does make me feel better, windsurfing and skiing give me a kind of mediative high. I've done a bungy jump which was exhilarating. Sex is good. Even something as simple as swimming in the sea is a buzz; something to do with the dark unknown beneath you and especially in Britain, the shocking cold of the water which probably forces your body to release endorphins. I've never done a parchute jump but you never know, there's plenty of time to change my mind. Then of course there's going out dressed as a woman. Huge buzz!

So will I try mushrooms? I'll be sure to let you know if I do, but in the meantime, I'm off to the medicine cabinet to get some drugs for my cold which is steadily getting worse.

Hey watch this trailer! It looks like it could be a really great attempt to make out Magic Mushrooms as the root of all evil. "Shrooms"

I don't think my old school friend Andy will be too chuffed, but there you go! I posted recently [see here] about his book I'm reading; "Shrooms - A cultural history of the Magic Mushroom", which is proving to be an absorbing read, so much so that I'm seriously thinking of foraging for some samples to try out. Hopefully things won't go as pear-shaped as they do in this trailer!

D doesn't get back from her 'girls's weekend away' until tomorrow evening. It's the ninth year in a row they've gone. Not wanting to brag, but I've become an old hand now. Keeping the household running while Mum's away is pretty easy. OK, she does leave me a list of things to remember, and the place goes from just looking ransacked (1st day) to looking like a four-way intersection pile-up between a clothing lorry, a Toy's R Us delivery truck, a muck-spreading tractor and a milk-float carrying (rather inexplicably) a consignment of tri-nitrotoluene.

I have done three loads of washing and hung them out. I have fed the kids and tomorrow they'll go to school with some edible things in their lunch box. Something of a result I think. It's very tiring though and there's almost zero personal time. I have NO idea how single mums manage!

I did manage to watch the film "300" in two installments. My verdict? 'Lord of the Rings' meets 'Gladiator'. Too much art and too little humanity. Style over substance. Ultimately missable. 2 out of 5.

Sometime soon, I hope I will get to go on one of my 'girly' nights out. There seems to be little action going on in that direction, or at least not much that I get invited to. Still, skiing in three weeks, and life doesn't really get any better than that.

My boy R wanted me to help him come up with some of our own Flanimals. If you haven't come across them, Flanimals are Ricky Gervais' creation for children. Here's my attempt.

The Shoepunk

The Shoepunk lives in trees and catches Flatchen for his tea. Flatchen are slimey and they taste like porridge and Marmite which is disgusting, so the Shoepunk hates them. Shoepunks aren't very clever, so they haven't worked out what else they can catch with their ringclaws. Amazingly, they always look happy!

From the BBC website, "According to Sweden's Sex Purchase Law - the Sexkopslagen - it is a crime to pay for sex, though selling sex remains legal."

Er...eh? Sorry, I must be a bit thick, but why make one illegal and keep the other legal? Are the Swedish the new Irish? I've wracked my brains, but I just don't see why this makes sense. For someone to sell sex, someone has to buy sex, no? So if one side of the equation is legal and the other is illegal... [Picture thoughtful pose with mushroom cloud hanging above the ruins of my brain].

I suppose it's been dreamed up by FAR cleverer people than me, who with a wink and a nudge, confidently predict that the whole thing is really carefully thought out and smugly raise their eyebrows as if to say "We'd hardly expect you to understand. Tsk!"

I've never used the services of a prostitute for several reasons: 1) I'd be embarrassed to try and locate a vendor, 2) I think that a good deal of the joy of sex with a partner is derived from the knowledge that they are hot for you and 3) I'm too cheap to want to pay. In spite of this, as men really do - for the most part - need sex, I think it seems sensible for them to be able to procure it if there are those willing to sell. If, by clamping down on the selling, or the buying, the idea is to stamp out the other crimes that seem to feed off this business like drugs and trafficking of girls/boys/etc, then it's a very feeble idea.

Anyone got any better ideas or is this really the only solution?

This looks like really bad news guys! It looks like we're being censored by mokono.

Check out this blog of mine from last year, paying special attential to the tags which include the word "hate". Link to rant! This word does not appear in my list of tags. Why?

I've added the word as a tag for this blog too. Let's see if it happens again.

Oh dear! Although the roller-disco went well yesterday and youngest had a great party, eldest was worried about Dotty, the Guinea Pig, who looked very listless.

Sure enough, when we got up this morning, Dotty was dead! Stiff, lifeless, cold... boo-hoo. Sadness prevailed. The first pet in our family to kick the bucket. So J and I made a little plaque and I dug a grave. A short and somber ceremony and then we threw a couple of clods of earth in each before I shovelled the rest on.

I do not think Patch will miss Dotty for more than a nano-second each day and then in two days, not at all. J very worried that he will pine away.

It couldn't really get much worse could it?

1) I've decided I like Port
2) I've got slippers
3) I'm seriously considering adopting my father in law's trouser press to hang my suit on when I get home from work
4) Gardening increasingly seems like a good way to spend a weekend
5) Everything on telly tonight is rubbish

See what I mean? It's beyond middle-aged really!

Youngest daughter's sixth birthday party tomorrow. Roller-blade disco! Wooo! Bless her cotton sox. Sigh! They're all growing up so I have to make the most of them before they start saying things like "I hate you!" or "Talk to the hand!" and mean it.

I'm reading a very old copy of Jules Verne, "20,000 leagues under the sea" to R. The language is really arcane from the turn of the last century and it REALLY hard to read without stumbling over the stuffy turn of phrase!

I met with the MD today over coffee. I wanted to explore his reasons for shutting the door on any company-recognised GLT network (see http://sleeper.blog.co.uk/2007/10/ for background).

"But look at the maths," I said. "Surely there's an incentive to give minority groups confidence that they are accepted. That can hardly be counter-productive?"

I didn't really get anywhere. "Work is for work stuff, anything else just isn't relevant," was the reply, in summary. It's not really true is it. The world is more entangled than that and shades of grey, not black and white.

It was an good chat. MiB is a good sort. I'm not a trouble-maker and running a company is hard enough without distractions like this, so I let it go. The truth is, there can't be many people in the company who don't know about my flavour of minority group, so hopefully, if there is anyone gay, lesbian or TG in the company, they should draw some strength from my semi-public stand.

Being a stay-at-home-Mum (or Dad) is the most important job in the whole world. I will brook no argument. Of course that doesn't mean that it suits every everyone. Better a happy career Mum than a depressed, unfulfilled stay-at-home.

My wife D (Supermum) - has looked into doing an Excel course. This is great news! Not because we need her to go out to work, although I'm sure the extra money would come in handy, but because I think it will do her good to get away from the house and cleaning up after me and the three kids. I have been treading carefully around this topic. I don't want to be seen to be devaluing the clean house and all that, but I also want D to have more of a sense of self and purpose outside of home. I get that, the children get it at school, so why shouldn't she?

I've done plenty of Excel, so why don't I train her? Because that would spell doom on our relationship. Apparently I'm either patronising or confusing-with-too-much-detail, never in-between. We don't work well in a learner-pupil context, either way round I suspect. Is it the same in all marriages?

From the sublime to the ridiculous. on Monday, I bought a new suit for £280 and then spent the evening patching a ripped knee on a pair of £30 jeans. Perhaps I sent myself on a guilt trip?

What does that mean? "What the hell is a 'caucasus'?" I thought to myself several times in the last few weeks of election waffle from the USA. Wikipedia came to the rescue (after I looked up the proper spelling on the BBC news website). Caucuses. Note the spelling...not like the region in Europe.

Hugh Fernly-Whatsisname...is currently doing a good thing promoting free-range poultry and showing us the evils of intense farming methods. In olden times, people treated their food with respect and many gave thanks to their god(s) or spirits for the gift of food. Now we delegate the food making to others and they deliver us rubbish served in polystyrene and treat the animals horribly...and we just don't give a f*ck! When we buy whole chicken, we do always buy free-range, but can't be sure about other meat we buy.

Am currently posted with a colleague in new department at work. 'Rock' is somewhat crazy but amusing with it. Another clever guy. Another person keeping the bar set high and making it tougher for folk like me!

Once again, I've lost the blug...that is the bug to blog. A veil of grey ordinariness seeps across the landscape of my life and so I fear that there is little to set your pulses racing. Happily for me, I am quite content with my lot. Things - as they say - could be a great deal worse. In lieu of exciting news from Sleepertown, here then are three media-bites for you:

A book to provoke fierce debate : "Love Life", by Ray Klunn. A true story about a man who screwed around while his wife died of cancer.

A book I found about magic mushrooms : "Shrooms" by Andy Letcher whom I went to school with! A road protester, an expert on neo-shamanism and a really, really nice guy.

An entertaining film : "Transformers", a Christmas pressie. Not much I can say except, "Pop your brain out and enjoy!" Well shot, great effects, a simple plot. Best thing in it is Shia LaBeouf...well, actually Megan Fox is damn hot!

Happy 2008 everyone! Be good to one-another!