April was quite an expensive month. I finally got round to getting Jayne and I new phones, I bought myself a car, and we bought a house! The house is a big deal, obviously, and I will probably go into all that in a separate post.

The rest of the month was pretty much business as usual. There were a few record fairs, in Horsham, East Grinstead and Crawley. I bought a few records at Horsham and East Grinstead, but none at Crawley. I think I have started to realise that each record I buy is one more thing to move to Scotland.

The record fairs do give me an excuse to go out on the bike. I am really not good at just going out for a ride and prefer to have a specific destination to aim for. Without a specific destination I just end up on a half-hour ride up the M23 to keep the battery charged. One such ride was notable because Jayne came a long after we finally got her bike working. She doesn’t use it regularly and so the battery had gone flat and it took a lot of hassle to get to it – Harleys are terrible to work on!

For obvious reasons I did lot more car driving than I would under normal circumstances, which might see me driving once during a month, and that would just be round the corner to the tip. I did drive round the corner for a tip run, but also took my new car up to Scotland and then drove all the way back. I would say that in one week I drove more miles than I would typically drive in a whole year.

I am surprised that I only read nine books in the month, considering that I spent a few days in a house with no TV, broadband, or indeed furniture. All nine books were fiction e-books.

I did watch a bit of telly in the month, including the start of the new Taskmaster series, and binge-watching series 2 of Last One Laughing on Amazon and Small Prophets on the iPlayer. I was a bit late to the Small Prophets party. Everybody was raving about it when it came out a month or two ago, but I only just got round to it. My enjoyment was only spoiled a little bit when I looked up the actor playing the main part and realised that he is a couple of years younger than me.

I only watched one film in April – A Line of Fire. It was another of those retired FBI agent having to return to action to save somebody. In this case it was his ex-partner’s daughter rather than his own, but otherwise the same plot as 90% of films on Netflix. But I liked it well enough, and it was only 90 minutes long. I have to say that the algorithm doesn’t have to do much work on Netflix to make recommendations – “You might like to watch this because you have watched 100 films with the same plot”

The month started with a £300 win on the Premium Bonds. Nice, but not making a dent in the £90,000+ I spent in April. But I can’t complain. I have bought a 3-bed semi and 10-year-old Astra and it all cost less than the cheapest 1-bed flat on the market in Crawley