The Missus has a lovely voice. All soft and sexy and gentle. Completely useless above background noise, but lovely all the same. She has a lovely singing voice too - sounds like a starling at dawn. Lovely.

So, this evening she was sitting with the headphones on, and singing along to "Fix You" by Coldplay. The thing is, that when you sing, there is a feedback loop going on. Your ears hear your voice, and automatically adjust your pitch to make sure tha you're in tune. When you have headphones on, your feedback loop is broken and you sound an awful lot like a broken piano. Most amusing to listen to.

My ageing friend was over today. Being a helpful chap, he moved Rosie for me onto the driveway. Now there is a golden rule about parking motorcycles - always park where gravity or the engine will get you out again. This simply means that when parking on a hill, park with the back wheel on the downhill side - you can ride out of it - and vice versa.

He rode Rosie nose-first into my downhill driveway. This means I need to go off-road (right over the Missus' lovely lawn) to get her out again. Boy, will I be in trouble. Please don't think for a second that he got away with doing this without a significant amount of piss-taking.

I did my Barbara Cartland impression today. I lay on the floor - all propped up with cushions and stuff - whilst he drew bizz-ness stuff on the whiteboard for the proposal we're writing. All I need now is a pink poodle. The crap dog came and lay beside me, but she's not quite a pink poodle.

The other day, she got "Cato'd" by a cat. If you remember the Pink Panther movies, Cato was Inspector Clouseau's assistant. His job was to hide and to ambush Inspector Clouseau when he was least expecting it. So the cat hid under a car, waiting for the crap dog to walk past. When she did so, the cat leapt out with a shriek resembling "BANZAI!" - right on top of the crap dog. The crap dog, shitting herself, ran a mile - with a hissing cat on her back. Poor thing.

I got the most lovely comment from Big Oz (the whoop-ass headcase with impressive welding skills) posted on the blog. Thanks Oz - made me and The Missus smile.

I also got an email from my ITM - whose daughters tooth has not yet fallen out - asking about my shoulder as well as finding out about when the first enduro of the New Year is (since this is when I'll be riding again). It's probably going to be another Track and Trauma on 13 January, and I will be doing it on a new AJP PR3 - all 89kg of her.

A lot of the guys out in Morocco were of the opinion that you need a really really big bike to do Dakar. This may well be true, but I am looking at the problem in a slightly different way. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Or, as Albert Einstein put it:

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

If there is anybody in the world who can do it, it's Martin at AJP. If there's anybody in the world who has the balls to attempt riding it to Dakar, it's me. I have so many balls that sometimes I feel like a bingo machine.

Having a busted collarbone is not that bad really. It means I get to walk about with one hand tucked into my shirt - makes me look a lot like Napoleon (short, French dead guy). Napoleon, having been deposed from power, was exiled to Elba by the British in May 1814. He spent the grand total of nine months on the island, before escaping and going back to Paris for the now legendary 100 days (blogs passim). If I get a silly hat, then start a war with pretty much everybody in Europe, then I'll end up following in his footsteps.

I was looking through the holiday insurance policy today to see if I could claim the medical expenses we incurred in Morocco. I came across a brilliant clause in the policy about accidental death, which types of death were covered and which weren't. Apart from the fact that I didn't know that there was degrees of death, I wondered about this.

How would you make a claim? Does the Insurance Company have a call centre in India, and a bunch of mediums in Manchester? Imagine the scene:

Medium: "Is there anybody there? Anybody on the other side?"
Me (dead): "Whooo!"
Medium: "What is your policy number?"

Doesn't quite work.

So I made a mistake, but I lived to tell the tale. Mr Einstein, who has a take on just about everything, put it better than I ever could:

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

Like a broken collar bone will stop me. This is a setback, but a temporary one. My ageing friend thinks I am completely sectionable but, in a funny kind of way, kind of admires me for it.

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