For some reason I’m in a bit of a reflective mood at the moment, thinking about my lot and being thankful for what I’ve got, and indeed what I’ve had, in my life.  There may be more posts in the same vein in the coming days, but first I want to write about someone special.

My uncle Stuart has Down’s Syndrome.

I was going to say he suffered from it, but to be honest I don’t think he does.  Of course, there are things he can’t do which other people can, but he is not as badly affected as others so is able to live a relatively normal life.

Was in Ikea the other day, wandering about when a guy with a couple of young kids confused me a bit.

His youngest girl was playing up, lifting stuff she shouldn’t have been touching and the like - as kids do - so he was trying to give her a bit of a talking to, which he did by calling her name.

“Denise……DENISE!”

I like sleep, always have and probably always will.

But since getting our kitten, Daisy, I haven’t been getting as much as I used to due to her insistence that someone gets up to feed and play with her whenever she wakes up - which is usually a good hour or two before I’d ideally be liking to waken.

However, it’s not all bad - in fact being up and about an hour earlier hasn’t affected me as much as I thought it might.  In the past, a lack of sleep has always made me grumpy with a longing all day for an early night so I can catch up straight away but that all seems to have left me now.

Riccardo Patrese was lucky enought to have a drive in a modern Honda F1 car last week and at the same time managed to snag a Civic Type-R so he could show his wife what he used to do for a living.

Despite the road-going Civic being much slower he still managed to scare the living daylights out of the poor woman - if only she had known she was being filmed at the time!

This is more than likely not safe for work to anyone who understands the lingo…

I was at Tesco in Carlisle the other day and became involved in a bit of people-watching.

Beside the carpark, they have a pretty big recycling area with skips or enclosures for pretty much everything you would ever want to get rid of - from glass and plastics to clothes and cardboard.

As a relative youngster with hopefully a good few years ahead of me, I’m trying to bear the need for recycling in mind and always assumed that the main users of these places would be people of a similar age to me.