They’ve gone off tonight to see Stevie Wonder at the Manchester Arena (M.E.N) … and Ann at least was like a kid at Christmas!

Still, at least he hasn’t let them down like Barry White did!

I bit the bullet this weekend and upgraded my ageing iPhone 3G to the newly released IOS4 even though I kept hearing of other peoples failures. After all how hard could it be and I do believe that most people do not read or follow instructions well and this was probably the cause of most failures.

I actually kicked it off with the full backup late (11:45pm) on Friday evening hoping to wake up on Saturday morning to a fully updated phone. Ha!

Saturday morning i get up to read the error message on my iMac saying the phone back up had failed! Even though it had gone through a full sync immediately prior to the backup being started.

Ok I thought, all photos, contacts, music and apps were either previously backed up or synced so let’s just do it anyway. So I said continue anyway… both crossing my fingers and wondering where my spare old Nokia was

Just over 90 minutes later I had an upgraded and empty phone. No contacts, texts, photos, apps or music … but it did seem to be more responsive!

I then did a sync and that put all of my stuff back and that was it. What a non-event!

The new folders work well (apart from the max items per folder limit being only 12!) and the new email client is nice to have. Other than that I feel the time to upgrade to an iPhone 4 is fast approaching.

Today I started back with GS, joining the old team I was working with back in 2008. I am really pleased to be back, as I still regard GS as one of the best companies that I have ever worked for.

Well this is a bonus … living in Manchester means that we can now pay a visit to Hay-on-Wye over a single day!  Ann, Wendy, Jim and myself left Manchester at 9am this morning and arrived in Hay-on-Wye around abut 12:30 after taking a leisurely drive off the motorways.

The little bit of a downer on the day came when we realized that the £1 book shop had been taken over by new management and that it was now a “£1, £2 or £3 book shop”

Still, I did manage to find 3 of the books that were on my, admittedly, short list of wanted books and altogether I got 14 books so that should keep me going for a few weeks   Ann really surprised me this time as she almost bought as many books as I did!  And Jim even managed to spend £4 on 3 books (thereby blowing his book budget for the next couple of years at least).

All in all it was a very pleasant day out for us all.

The day is finally here … the house is sold and we’re off to “sunny” Manchester to live.  So after 32 years I am finally “returning home” (who’d of thunk it?).

We expected that it would take the four removal men about 90 minutes to load up the house contents as it was all boxed up and stacked in the room nearest to the front door (except for the beds and sofas), but no, it actually took almost 5 hours!