oxfordhacker

Oops. A lazy morning followed by a busy afternoon and evening means that this is late, but morally, if I haven't gone to sleep the day hasn't ended, so this still counts. I don't have the time to do a recommendation post, because that involves a load of links and lovingly-selected excerpts and stuff, for me to do full justice to the object of my linkery. Instead, I will write about something I did earlier this week, on the grounds that if I fail to do myself full justice, then I only have myself to blame.

tinyjo's school had a bonfire on Friday, for which, of course, they needed fuel. They had some battered old wooden chairs, but they needed to be broken up before they were suitable firewood. I assume that, having agreed this, they ranked all the teachers and their partners in terms of furniture-wrecking potential, and I won. One might suggest that, if so, this was more a tribute to tinyjo's high opinion of me rather than any more objective assessment, but I'll accept that. The result was that four chairs appeared in our back garden, destined for devastation at my hands.

Never one to shirk my girlfriend-given duties, when I got back from work on Thursday I gathered hand-axe and saw, and headed out onto the patio in the twilight to perform some helpful destruction. To ensure that I cut a suitably dramatic figure, I stripped to waist before getting to work. The chairs were a perfect challenge: tough but not invulnerable, and their childish size made me feel like a rampaging giant as I methodically reduced them to flinders. I would thoroughly recommend this method for raising one's mood, and were I more business-minded I would be buying old school furniture and selling it on as a mood-enhancing therapy, perhaps packaged with a pop-psychology book. 'Smash Yourself Happy' perhaps?