How on earth is anyone supposed to get a mortgage for the first time in this current climate? Where I live in Hampshire, you need about £200,000 for a shitty little mid-terrace two bed place with no garden whatsoever. Just say that my wife and I could actually afford to pay that kind of mortgage, at the moment I would need a 30% deposit in order to secure that.

Now I’m not a mathematician but that’s £60 fucking thousand pounds!!! There just can’t be many people with that kind of cash to spunk on a deposit can there? My wife and I both earn reasonable amounts but we’re never going to get that kind of money together.

In fact, if we scrimped and saved every single spare penny we have, it would probably take us 10-12 years with no life whatsoever to get that money together. What a shitty situation to be in!

I’d love to hold my head high and carry my beautiful wife over the threshold of our first home together sometime this century but it’s clear that it just isn’t going to happen and that is bloody depressing.

We could probably get a one bed flat for around £140,000 but that’s no good when you’re planning to have kids in the near future. We’d be stuck there for ten years with our first born living on the sofa. Something has just got to give surely?

Either the house prices must come down to accommodate people like us, or the banks must ask for less deposit. How will people ever get on the ladder otherwise? There’s always the bank of mum and dad of course but they aren’t going to want to give me £60,000 when they’re looking at retirement in three or four years.

It’s sodding depressing for a thirty-something at the moment trying to make their way in the world.

So…if someone reading this blog could please leave the winning lottery numbers in the comments field, that would be lovely. Thanks.

Other than that, everything is fine and golf is getting better…

Chin up eh! lol

It didn’t go down too well when I sent her an email on the dame day with a video collage of women smashing cars…oops..timing is everything…

There goes my no claims then.

So looking at the Macbook pro - what do you get for your money - toss all compared to the PC option. OK, they apparently “just work” but it’s a hell of a lot of money.  Add the adobe creative suite that she’d need and you’re looking at thousands of pounds.

It’s a joke really - how do the likes of Apple and Adobe expect young people to access their products? It’s just too flaming expensive. Software is way to much money and I hope that the future brings the prices of products like this down.

Give me a copy with advertising in or that’s subsidised somehow - anything please!!

As much as I love the idea of owning a mac with all the gubbins….no chance in the near future. I could quite literally buy a new car for that money. No thanks - I’ll stick to freeware or cheaper software from the net and buy a same spec PC for one third of the price.

Come on someone - convince me otherwise??

The significance of this disparity is underlined by the finding that 60% of respondents had already held leadership positions by the time they reached 25. The survey found that the majority of these leadership positions were in employment. This suggests that there are many young people taking the lead in the UK’s workplaces who feel that they are not getting the leadership development they need. That the UK is neglecting its leadership pipeline by failing to prepare its young leaders to become the senior leaders of tomorrow.

Julia Middleton, Chief Executive of Common Purpose says: “We have to redress this imbalance because organisations and society need more young people prepared and able to stand up as leaders.

“You have to learn to lead young because it’s a bumpy ride, you inevitably get it right and wrong for a long time, and you have to be able to bounce back, forgive yourself and keep going.”

To address this problem, Common Purpose is expanding Frontrunner, its leadership development programme for the UK’s young adults. The Frontrunner programme uses real-life situations as its classroom. Participants are taken to a diverse range of organisations where they explore the problems they are facing, alongside the people who are tackling them. This is a rare chance to explore what is required to lead effectively with people already leading change in society. Participants also gain a stimulating new peer network of other leaders across the UK.

Frontrunner is a residential course that will be held five times in 2009:

• 22-25 June 2009, in London
• 6-9 July 2009, in Glasgow
• 13-16 July 2009, in Leeds
• 2-5 September 2009, in Bristol

• 7-10 September 2009, in Belfast

There are over 100 free places on the programme and the application process is now open to people over the age of 18, who may be in full-time education or are in the very early stages of their career, and who have already shown evidence of leadership. The deadline for the Glasgow, Leeds and London Frontrunner programmes is 27 April 2009.  The deadline for the Bristol and Belfast programme is 27 July 2009. The short application process can be found online:  http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/frontrunner or telephone 020 7608 8148 for further details. 

So I got on the website, signed up and awaited my delivery of diet goodies to get me going…By the time the pack arrived I was already into the third day of my diet and feeling pretty hungry, missing all the things that made me fat in the first place, namely Pizza.

The pack arrives in the post and I eagerly open it and what do I find???  A flaming pizza box!!!!

Now is it just me or does that really look like a pizza box??

Thanks for that Weight Watchers, really appreciate the the helping hand with my diet there. Jees, how stupid have you got to be to sign off that in the ‘diet pack department’. It’s probably some some skinny, preachy bastard…you know the type.

“Weight Watchers…helping you think of pizza when you should be thinking of celery”

“Weight Watchers, making that journey a little bit harder”

“Weight Watchers, tempting you fat bastards”

Sorry, got carried away there, I love making up quotes. Lol. Anyway you get the point…

Set-up some tees

To make sure you are swinging correctly, you can use this simple practice technique. Place the putter club head on the ground and place two tee pegs in the ground on either side of the putter. Leave around 2/3mm gap on each side. Then try swinging back and forth without hitting the tee pegs at all. If you get good at this, you’ll be putt perfect in no time.

You can extend this tip by placing tee pegs in the ground both in front of and behind your other pegs, in the same way as above. This will ensure that both your backswing, downswing and follow through are all exactly in line as they should be.

Club selection

It may not sound important but when you’re buying a new putter, look out for the ones that allow you to line up easily. I had a putter once and the only marking on it to help me line up was a mark like this “<” I just could not line my putts up properly no matter how hard I tried, the marking was just too small.

Make sure you take that into consideration when you’re buying your next putter. I got over the problem by scoring two lines down the putter like this —– it helped me to line up better and saved me buying a new one! The Callaway tri-ball putters are particularly good to line up and can help out greatly.

Remove your golf glove

Another simple tip when you’re putting is to remove your golf glove. Why? Becuase you can feel more with your hand out of the glove. That will help you to better guague your putts. Simple!

Good luck practicing and let me know how you get on with these tips!

I got stitched up last year by one of the parks and I’m still seething about it. I saw the deal in the paper, saved the tokens up and arranged for eight of my mates to go down to one of the parks near Bournemouth for 2 nights in a mobile home.

All of us are 30 or thereabouts and are married or with a partner. We duly paid the £9.50 each and booked the holiday through The Sun, total £76. We were all really looking forward to the holiday and eagerly awaited the reply from the holiday park. After a month or so we got a letter from the park asking us for more money to secure the booking. They wanted a £25 booking fee, a £50 security deposit….and the best one - £50 noise deposit which was payable on arrival in cash, yet not returned until two weeks after we’d left the park. What a fu**ing con!

The holiday park is obviously tying to re-coup costs from being involved with this Sun promotion. I was so angry! I decided to phone the park and ask them why they needed this noise deposit and why we couldn’t have the money back on the day we left the park? I was told that youngsters like us cause trouble and £50 deposit was to make up for lost bookings that would inevitably be caused by our arrival.

To be honest I couldn’t believe I was hearing it. We are a group of people in our thirties!! We’re not 16 year olds away for the first time without mummy and daddy for god’s sake. The next question was obviously: What’s the criteria? Who decides if we lose our deposit? She said that it one takes one complaint from one person for you to lose your deposit!! Unbelievable.

What a complete load of crap! So we’re supposed to pay:

• £76 original cost
  £50 security
  £50 noise deposit
  £25 Booking fee
  TOTAL = £201

Guess how much it is to hire a mobile home in that park, on that day without the Sun deal??? Oh come on I bet you know….wait for it…….yup, it’s £200. So what do you think my chances were of getting my “security” and “noise” deposits back? Small to none I reckon.

I passed the news onto my friends who understandably all said, “no way, I’m not paying for that, I won’t see the money again.” We were left with no option but to cancel the holiday and ask for our money back.

No chance!! Apparently we broke our contract with them and therefore are not entitled to any money back. So now I owe 6 people £9.50 which pisses me off! What a complete con!

I know I could spend even more time writing letters and phoning etc etc and I’d probably get my money back if I did but I can’t be bloody bothered anymore. I’d rather spend my time writing this, so other people don’t get conned by the same thing.

So, in conclusion - don’t touch the Holidays for £9.50 promotion, it’s a complete con!

I think they should change the slogan to:
“Fuck all for £76″

or

“£76 for nothing……and your friends will think you conned em”

or

“Loads of agro for £76 when all you wanted was a weekend away from the monotony of bastards like us”

Tip 1

Line the ball up with your left eye...

Not setting yourself up properly is one of the most likely things to cause duff putts. Check that you’re doing it right. As you stand over the over the ball at address you should line up with your left eye directly over the top of the golf ball.