So fa, so good...

My wife first asked me about getting a new sofa a few months back. I looked at her with some chagrin and dismissed the idea as lunacy. To be fair, I have no interest in buying anything that can not be eaten, drank or plugged in so I forgot about it. A few months passed until it happened. It was just after Christmas and if I recall I had been drinking heavily. The usual run of sofa adverts were on the television encouraging the masses to get up at 9am on boxing day and look at furniture. My wife turned to me and asked about the sofa. I smiled and looked at the screen. I saw a plethora of happy, smiling families all relaxing on their new sofas. "That could be me" I thought to myself. "This sofa could turn our lives around! This is the first day of the rest of our lives!".

How utterly stupid I was. As I was working and also busy preparing for my driving test, I agreed to let my wife go and choose the sofa. She managed to secure a good price and the delivery would commence within a month. Upon looking at the receipt, I saw that the person who sold it to her was called "Vaish". I was impressed that his gentlemen was so famous, he has dispensed with the need for a surname. I checked with my wife that she had told him the measurements for our house as we live in a terraced house and neither of us wanted the sofa stuck in our hallway. She said she had and to be honest we were worrying about nothing anyway. We laughed and laughed and laughed......

A month went by and one Friday afternoon my wife got the call.

"The sofa will be here tomorrow!" she explained to me.

So, Saturday came and we waited...and waited..and waited. I had put my best shirt on so that I could be like the cool guy on the DFS advert who relaxes on his couch and probably uses the juke box in pubs without breaking it. It was about ten to five, when the whole world fell apart. The door bell rang and in stepped two burly men who asked me sign something that said they had delivered the sofa in one piece. To be fair, they did. The sofa was in no way damaged. Our new lives could begin!

Oh how stupid we were. The men began to lift the sofa and tried to get it into our living room. After about ten minutes, they put it down and turned to me and said "It will not fit through your door mate!" Then they turned to each other and laughed. So as not to be rude I laughed as well. My wife was not laughing. She explained that the salesman had assured her the sofa would fit into the house and that it was only because of that that she had bought it. Could things get worse? You bet your sweet ass they could.  The delivery driver then said that if we did not keep sofa, they would charge us to take it back...and then redeliver it. They asked if we knew anyone that could remove our window frame on the "hobble". At the time I had no idea what this meant and this seemed to confuse the delivery man. Suddenly, I was in the wrong. Little did I know that knowledge of local handy men and their colloquialisms is a prerequisite for buying a sofa now. After much debating, we chose to keep the sofa and as the men left, they told us the moral of the story...."Never trust a salesman". Perhaps if they did not work for the same company as him, this statement would have had the same ring as one of Aesop's fables. Regardless of this, our small hallway was now blocked by a huge sofa which obstructed the stairs and meant going to bed was like appearing on an episode of the Krypton Factor.

This was not how it was supposed to be. By now, my wife was supposed to reading a magazine and laughing like a maniac and I was supposed to be watching some sporting event with friends and jeering/cheering wildly depending on the result. Instead my wife was shouting down the phone and I was on Twitter pleading for help. Luckily that help came in the form of the Roger Cook of Twitter..i.e rjward . He began reeling of legal loop holes and consumer rights like I was appearing on an episode of Watchdog again. He even got the me the email address of the CEO and asked me to e mail him. Before I could do any of this, I decided to do what any other good husband would do when he wife was crying down the phone. I got drunk...

The next morning I felt better. I jumped out of bed looking forward to a lazy day on my new sofa. Then I remembered....Just as all hope was lost however, the phone rang. It was a local glazier who heard about our predicament and he said he could remove our window and help us deliver the sofa! Hossanah! King of Kings! To be honest, I swear he was laughing down  the phone at me. No matter. He arrived and began to remove the window and then he uttered the words that no skinny, geeky pale man wants to hear..

"Can you give me a hand with this mate?"

I stared at him, ashen faced. I grabbed the window gingerly and he looked at me like I had just walked into his house wearing nothing but flowery sandals and a cowboy hat. Luckily one of my neighbours saw the problem and offered to help. Within ten minutes, my sofa was delivered and my wife was happy again. We sat and began our new life. To be honest, it is a nice sofa but I am not sure anything was worth that.

You have been warned.

Chin up.

If you had said to me a year ago that Blackpool would not only be in the premiership but also be doing quite well, I would have assumed you were either on narcotics or "twisting my melon". Equally if you had said to me a year ago that David Cameron would be prime minister with Nick Clegg as his deputy I would have slapped you in the face and thrown you out of my basement. In fact, it does not seem so long ago when myself and my Lib Dem followers would engage in heated political discourse, usually reducible to fundamental disagreements on European integration and childish name calling. Those days are gone. Well, at least for the time being...

One positive aspect of this coalition has been finding common ground with those I personally considered to be our opponents. What is interesting is how much common ground can be found with many Liberal Democrats, especially on the fundamental questions of taxation and personal liberties. The key areas where we differ (most notably European Federalism and Trident) seem to have been worked around...at least..for the time being (The former is becoming less of an issue every day as the the Euro becomes more unsustainable). So, despite my apparent misgivings (I gave it six months) the coalition is in full swing and it seems so far..so...ok. Yes, there have been some unfortunate incidents. The 0.5% contraction in the final quarter's economic figures did not help. Osbourne blaming it on the snow made it worse. What we have to remember is that it was never going to be easy. Brown had thirteen years to increase the size of the state and increase public spending far beyond what we as a country could afford. The cuts which Osbourne proposes are, by comparison, tiny. This will not help the people who will inevitably lose their jobs. What will be of some comfort are the two little spoken about tax reductions which were proposed in the last budget and will be expanded upon at the next. The first is the lowering of corporation tax to allow the private sector to once again flourish in the UK. It is predicted that this will lead to the creation of 1.5 million new jobs. The second will be the increase in the tax free allowance for working people. This will have a huge impact on low and middle income families and will live many less well off people out of tax completely.

There are however key areas where I believe the coalition could improve. The maintaining of the 50% upper tax rate for high earners when it is already clear it will raise no revenue is a worry. The "ring fencing" of certain public spending areas such as the International Development Budget when some the money could be better spent elsewhere is laughable. Listening to Vince Cable (the business secretary) bemoan the perils of Capitalism..... Despite all this, for better or for worse, the coalition has fared better over the past months than I or any others expected it to. I also expect the protests and strikes to get a lot worse over the next few months.

Just remember, chin up. Could be a lot worse. Brown could still be the PM....or the awful cat lady...

First

I have never had a blog before so this is a test post. Any hints/design ideas would be greatly appreciated. First proper post due soon. If you can contain your excitement...