This is David. Say hello, David.

I'll be posting only sporadically, if at all, for the next week or two. Nothing to worry about, just going to be veeeery busy. More news soon. In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine and the canapés.

Well, we have a new leader in the UK this morning; he looks and sounds a lot like the old one, although with any luck he'll be a good deal less smug and complacent than the old one. I dislike intensely the way Blair handled (and is still handling) the Iraq crisis, and would dearly have loved to see cuddly old Charlie Kennedy stomping up the steps of Number 10 just to piss everybody off. On the other hand, at least we haven't ended up with another Tory government - particularly one run by Michael Howard, of whom I have unfond memories from the Thatcher years, and whom one of my friends described colourfully as "a bastard-coated bastard with a chewy bastard centre".

Maybe Kylie Minogue was right... better the devil you know.

Can I just say that this is a stroke of genius.

UPDATE: Bluepoppy has kindly pointed out that I've omitted to mention what my 6 unique phrases would be. Well, here they are:

1. "Belt up" (obvious, but necessary)
2. "Does my bum look big in this?"
3. "ARMING INCENDIARY DEVICE: 00:01:45"
4. "This is the Thought Police; stop looking at that bloke's groin"
5. "Insert 20p to open"
6. "My other belt is a Knight Industries 2000"

So what are yours?

Took Sarah to the West Midlands Safari Park over the long weekend. She does love animals, that kid, so we thought it would be a sure-fire winner, and we were right. Boy, were we right. She hasn't stopped going on about it for two days. "Sarah saw a nocerus!" "Saw lots of lions!" "Woofs running!" (...which we're pretty sure means 'wolves'.) "Got a big elephant!" (Yeah, he fits neatly into our 10ft² garden.)

It's a pretty decent day out, actually, if you don't mind sitting in your car for a few hours queueing to drive, at an asthmatic snail's pace, in a long convoy around four miles of knackered tarmac whilst various African wildlife stares at you superciliously and wonders whether it can (a) eat you or (b) crap on your car. But the wildlife is worth it; we saw (amongst other things) wildebeest, Bactrian camels, white tigers, wild dogs, wallabies ("little baby kangaroos jumping!"), rhinos, eland, emus, zebras, yaks, Przewalski's horses (try saying that with your mouth full), llamas, and some kind of big cow with bloody enormous horns. It's probably the longest we've ever managed to get Sarah to sit in one place for - about three hours, all told, which probably qualifies us for some kind of parenting medal. She was glued to her car-seat with eyes wide and mouth akimbo, and hasn't stopped talking about it since. Bless.

The oddest incident happened near the end of the enclosures section, where we saw something big standing in the middle of the road. It was a very strange animal indeed. It had the body of a giraffe, the head of a giraffe and the feet of a giraffe. This led The Missus, perhaps prematurely, to exclaim, "Look at the giraffe!", but given its patient enthusiasm for sticking its head through the open window of each car and licking the occupants, I suspect it was actually a very large species of dog. It had obviously been fed at some point by the owners of a previous vehicle and, being an intelligent kind of twenty foot-tall spotty dog, had decided to beg for more of the same from the rest of us. As I had some leftover goat food in the car (don't ask), I proffered my hand and was duly coated in giraffe (sorry, I mean giant dog) saliva, which has got to be the smelliest and stickiest substance known to biology, and given the astonishing length of giraffes' giant dogs' tongues there was quite a lot of it. But it's OK! Johnson's Baby Wipes (half a packet of them) came to the rescue. Also, I can now cross "get licked by a giraffe" off my list of Things To Do Before I Die. So it's all good.