Santa Claus is real...the Thunderbirds told me so....

Glad Tidings for this, the festive season...

That one time of year when everyone is that bit nicer to the guy next door, and the postie takes the time to ring your doorbell to give you your mail.....as he wants a tip.......

the big question is, why cant we do this all the time???... I insist that the support team are as helpful, polite, friendly and professional at all times....and it just comes naturally...so surely, Mr Postie could be a bit more cheery on his daily routine, and Mr Blogs the bank teller could be a little more smiley when you go in to pay your bills.

Now, As Yahoo Serious the python is being a tad uncooperative in the papparazzi stakes, and point blank refuses to have his picture taken, it left me wondering what to share with you all for this blog.... So, I decided to post up my all time favourite Jeremy Clarkson column. I know, I know...some of you hate him, some of you love him... I think the guy is one of the funniest men alive...and intelligent with it...

Well, before you start reading the column, I would just like to say a few thank yous...

To the Support Team.... without your constant deligence, and hard work, we wouldnt be where we are now...top of our field...Thank you

To the Training Team... Unsung heros of Synchro..thank you for your continued professional, expert, advice...not just to our customers, but to all members of the Synchro32 family.

The Dev Team.... for putting up with a constant barrage of Support team calls, asking you for a months work in 10 mins.....and you doing just that... Thank you massivley.

The Marketing Dept/ Web team... Thank you for all your hard work, if it wasnt for you guys constantly ensuring we're in the public eye, and coming up with lots of new ideas for the Synchro32 website, we'd be sunk.

The Accounts dept.... Thank you for NEVER getting my pay packet wrong.... Only joking... Thanks for ensuring that our hundreds of customers can rely on you for upto date accounts advice, invoice backups, and licenses...

and most important of all...

OUR CUSTOMERS...... Thank you...... and may you and your families enjoy the very best festive season.

now..... Heres that column piece I promised.....

If a newspaper columnist wants to live an easy life, then it’s sensible to steer clear of certain issues. Laying into Jesus is right out. And it’s probably not a good idea to say the poor should have their shoes confiscated.
But the greatest taboo — the biggest landmine of the lot — is the touchy subject of horses.
I once wrote a column suggesting that nobody should be allowed to keep a pet unless their garden is big enough to exercise it. Under no circumstances, I argued, should you be allowed to put your animal in a lorry and drive it on the public road at 4mph. This went down badly. It turned out that there are three million horsists in Britain and each one of them wrote to me, hoping that I would die soon.

So I made a mental note to skirt round equine issues in future. Sadly, though, there are now three million and one horsists in Britain because my wife has just bought a brace of the damn things. I don’t know how much they cost but since they were imported from Iceland, I’m guessing it was quite a lot. Not as much, however, as they’re now costing the National Health Service. The first to fall off was my nine-year-old son.
He’d seen his sister trotting round the paddock and, being a boy, figured he could do it, too. Sadly I wasn’t around to stop him so I’ve only heard from the ambulancemen what happened exactly.

The next casualty was our nanny, who disproved the theory that when you fall off a horse you should get straight back on again. Because having done that she promptly fell off a second time. We had to mash her food for a while but she’s better now. So what about my wife? Well, as I write she’s skiing in Davos. Except she’s not because 24 hours before she was due to go she came off the nag, spraining her wrist and turning one of her legs into something the size, shape and texture of a baobab tree. So actually she’s in Davos, drinking. Apparently the accident was quite spectacular. On a quiet road, just outside David Cameron’s house incidentally, she took the tumble with such force that she was incapable of moving. And had to ring the nanny who, as a result of her fall, could only limp to the scene of the accident.

Needless to say the horse, with its walnut-sized brain, had been spooked by the incident and had run off. Neither of the girls was in a fit state to catch it, which meant a ton of (very expensive) muscle was galavanting around the road network, as deadly and as unpredictable as a leather-backed Scud missile.

After it was returned by a sympathetic neighbour, I offered to get a gun and put the bloody thing out of my misery. But no. The accident was not the horse’s fault, apparently. And nor will my wife take the blame, because she’s been riding since she was an embryo and hunting since foetus-hood. What happened was that the horse skidded on the tarmac. I see. An Icelandic horse, capable of maintaining significant speed over lava fields and sheet ice, couldn’t stay upright on asphalt. Of course. Stands to reason. So now all the female members of the Clarkson household are busy joining internet campaigns to get every road in the land resurfaced with special horse-grip tarmac.

This, it seems to me, is the problem with horse ownership. You can’t have one half-heartedly. Every morning you must go and clear its crap from the stables, and then you must spend the afternoon combing it and plaiting its tail and feeding it tasty apples. And then each night, as you get into bed, each bruise and aching joint serves as a painful reminder of that day’s accident. Horses take over your life as completely as paralysis. You can think of nothing else. And this gives the horse fraternity a sense that the whole world revolves around their pets, too. That’s why the hunting crowd are so vociferous. Because for them it’s not a pastime. It’s an all-consuming life. And it’s why my wife wants all roads resurfaced. More than that, she comes back every day white with apoplexy with something a “motorist” has just done. Not slowing down. Not moving over enough. Not coming by. Not turning the radio down. This from a woman who refuses to drive any car with less than 350 brake horsepower.

Of course we’re told often and loudly that roads were originally intended for horses, and that’s true. In the same way that the royal family was originally intended to govern. But times move on. The horse was replaced by the car and became a toy. And now it should be allowed on the roads, in the same way that the Queen is allowed into parliament. Briefly, and by invitation only. I’ve always said that if a boy comes to take my daughters out on a motorbike I shall drop a match in the petrol tank. And that if he buys another I shall do it again. But in the past month I’ve learnt that four legs are infinitely more dangerous than two wheels. So if he turns up on a horse I shall shoot him, and it. In the meantime I have to content myself with the behaviour of my donkeys. All they do, all day, is run up to their new, bigger field-mates and kick them.

See you in the New Year folks..