Yes its the battle of epping forest, right outside your door...No, you aint seen nothing like it, not since the civil war...

I went paint balling with Dr Phil Chuck Slavakia Well'Ard and Justin the French Guy a few weeks back (my first time) which was super ace fun. It really hurt to get hit by the balls (eeewww!) up close but from far away it wasn't so bad. We got to run around on this farm in camouflage overalls and face masks and shoot people we didn't know, which is always cool. There was a series of areas like a field with hay bales and a forest with a stream running through it and a field with all these old tanks and jeeps and things set up so you could hide behind them. You played two games of Capture the Flag in each field, had a quick wee break and then moved onto the next. It was almost an entire day of rootin' tootin' shootin' fun (actually, it was just shootin'...sadly, there was a distinct paucity of both rootin' and tootin'). The gender balance was way off and the few girls who played tended to hang at the back sewing or vacuuming or doing the dishes or whatever, hoping they could avoid being shot. But it backfired on them (pun intended) because our blue team were better players (or had a higher percentage of psychos and divorcees with pent up rage aplenty) and tended to overpower them, so once all of their dudes got shot we would storm their base and shoot our collective load all over the screaming cowering ladies (which sounds hot but, frankly, anything can get boring when you do it often enough). When it was all over I still had some ammo left so while Dr Phil was painting a smiley face on the wall, I snuck up and shot him a bunch of times in the ass. I laughed and laughed but then he shot me in the shoulder blade while I was running away and it REALLY fucking hurt. I've still got a bruise and I can't lie on my back. I hate him, he's such a cheater...

American Girlflen has moved into her new place in Fulham. It's a tidy little 2-bedroom, upstairs/downstairs, row house affair on a quiet little street with a quaint (ie. small) backyard in the non-sketchy part of South West London. It's a bit of an extra hike on my treadly but is within walking distance of the Fulham stadium (come on you Whites!) and some nice restaurants and cafes. There may even be an opportunity for Handy Man to come out of forced retirement and don the overalls once again, although this would need to be prefaced by a power tools shopping spree of epic proportions. Stay tuned for more exciting news...

So the trip to Bologna has been postponed for now. Instead, me American Girlflen and I are taking the Eurostar (that's a train, ignorami) to Paris for a long weekend in August. "Ooh la la!" I hear you say in your best creepy Maurice Chevalier accent, to which I reply "Ja! Schnell! Nach!" and you roll over and surrender like the cheese-eating surrender monkey that you are. I'm not looking forward to the snobby attitude and the infrequent bathing, but I am looking forward to the rich food and the chance to make "wee" jokes at every opportunity. I bet you there's not nearly as much accordion music or berets as I'm hoping there will be.

I bought the kids a buttload of disgusting American candy while I was in Boston at this place called Sugar Heaven. Now, I'm not a candy connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I loathe the stuff (much to my daughter's chagrin) but even I can tell that there's just something not right about American candy. And no, it's not because they call it 'candy' instead of 'lollies', it just seems like in almost every case they managed to create something awesome but they ruined it by adding something extra and unnecessary and weird, like dried prunes or vegemite or dead bees. I crammed in as much as my suitcase would allow and I can't help but smile as I imagine them fleeing from hordes of candy zombies clamouring for their delicious guts. I'm the Candy Man...I got the sweet, sweet candeh...

Reports of the death of printed newspapers are highly exaggerated if the number of free newspapers handed out on London street corners is any gauge. There's London Lite, City AM, City PM, Metro, City News...and those are just the more reputable ones. And they each have their own distributors standing on practically every street corner in the city when you're on your way to or from work, you run a Gutenbergian gauntlet of cheap paper and finger-staining ink as each of them enthusiastically forces their respective rag in your face, pleading with their hungry eyes for you to at least take one even if you don't want to read it cos simply throwing it away is enough to justify their ridiculous 'units shifted' advertising model. Dude, I know where you are, ie. every single street corner, so if I want a friggin' paper I'll come to you...don't be shoving it all up in my grill. So of course the city ends up plastered with thousands of discarded newspapers, piling up in trains and buses and blowing about the windy streets like poorly researched tumbleweeds. I don't read them because a) it's yesterday's news harvested from the internet, b) it's insanely wasteful of natural resources, and c) all they ever report about is knife crime and Amy Fucking Winehouse. I look forward to the day when the two dominant UK journalistic paradigms come together in some serendipitous synchronicity and some chav stabs Amy Winehouse to death...