So it was my birthday last week, and I hit a milestone which wasn’t particularly wanted! For my 40th, I travelled to America and spent my actual birthday in New York which was pretty cool, but for my 50th I didn’t really want to do anything to celebrate! Anyway, back to that in a minute!

Mum came up to stay for a few days on Tuesday, with the main idea to clear out the planter in my back garden and put some new plants in there. We hit a slight issue quite early on due to the fact that the plant that was already in there didn’t want to come out! I was given a couple of pot plants as a birthday present about 9 or 10 years ago, and I stuck them outside in the planter because I didn’t have anywhere in the house to put them at the time, but since then, they’d exploded from their pots and grown to a ridiculous size!

So it actually took quite a few days to hack away at it, and once we’d removed most of the leaves, found that it had become a massive stump that had roots that had spread throughout all of the soil! It was really difficult to get out because it was so big and heavy, and also because of the space it was in made it really difficult to manoeuvre.

Using various tools and brute force we did eventually get the stump out, and then also had to remove a lot of the old soil because it was so full of roots.

We still bought a load of plants last week, even though there wasn’t time to plant them yet. Mum had brought a few up with her, but we went to a local garden centre and also to B&Q and bought a nice selection to fill out the planter. I think she’s going to pop back next week to finish it off, giving me time to buy loads of new soil!

For my actual birthday, we went out for a meal at the Ashlea pub in Cheadle – I’ve been there a few times and the food has always been alright although maybe a bit pricey. Anyway, we both opted for steak and chips, but when it came, mum said her food cold so had to get it done again! Mine was okay, I guess it must’ve been a similar temperature, but it didn’t bother me so much so I ate it, but that meant by the time mum finally got to eat, I’d totally finished mine! It reminded me a bit of my 40th birthday meal in New York with Emma, when my meal was fine but she had to complain because hers was cold! It must be a birthday tradition!

A couple of other thing to update on – last Sunday I did a bit of photography for Gag Reflex, taking some stills of Adam Kay performing at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. I had to take a few set-up photos on the stage before the audience came in, and then take shots of him doing his set from one of the boxes at the side of the stage, as well as going down to the stalls and taking some pictures from the back and sides. I think I got a good selection of images, and Adam seemed like a really nice guy too. And the extracts he read from his new book were really funny, and quite poignant at times too.

And then last night I was at The Lowry to see Harry Hill. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time – right back from when he had his surreal TV show in Channel 4 back in the 90s. His live show is just as strange, and shows that his humour goes a lot further than what most people know through his TV Burp stuff. A very fun night indeed!