Strange Thoughts of a Strange Man

New Year's Resolutions 2012

2012-01-01T01:27:00.001Z

I'm sure I make and break the same resolutions every year. For the record, however, here are my resolutions for 2012:

To lose weight (again). I lost nearly two stone in the last year but put a large part of that back on recently. This will stop.
To spend less. This comes at the end of a week that saw me spend over £600 on replacing tyres on my car and £1600 on my annual season ticket. Both costs were unavoidable but not a promising start. I will definitely spend less in the coming weeks!
To finish my novel. I could do a few hundred words a day or more if I tried.

I feel very committed but we all do,don't we?

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Day thirty

2011-11-30T18:29:00.001Z

Day thirty, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Last one for this year!

I have learnt a few things during Movember ...

Firstly, that growing a moustache takes me about two to three weeks before it looks anything like I would like it to look. Seeing other men with decent looking moustaches has been a treat but has made me rather jealous.
Secondly, it is so grey! I look like someone's granddad. Well, I am 47 so I suppose it is possible. Despite that, I do actually like it. I may even keep it. I know I would keep it if I regrew the beard but part of me really likes this.
Thirdly, that taking a picture of myself every day is a pain and is the part of Movember I absolutely hated. I have to think of something funny or I look awful.
Fourthly, I need to lose some weight!
And fifthly, that wallpaper really has to go.

Many thanks to all who donated money. My team raised £307 of which £172 was via my MoSpace. There's still another couple of weeks before the account closes if you want to make a sudden final donation: http://mobro.co/DrRobWilliams

Day twenty eight

2011-11-28T20:12:00.001Z

Day twenty eight, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
I do need a haircut.

mobro.co/DrRobWilliams

Operation

2011-11-27T23:04:00.000Z

Oddly, although I don't mind inflicting this on the world through my blog, I am somewhat more reluctant to spill all on Facebook. Howver, now that the RSS feed for my blog is no longer picked up by Facebook, I feel safer blogging about my operation.

My reticence is partly down to embarrassment. This is a sensitive subject as you will find if you elect to read on. It is also partly due to avoiding the concerned messages I would receive from family and friends. While it is nice knowing that people are that concerned, my reason for writing this is not to garner sympathy.

Why I have decided to write this rather personal piece is purely in case someone else is in a similar position to me a few months before the op. It is possible they might get something from this.

There will be some reading this who do know me. You may have seen my other post about the op and probably my Facebook posts about it. You will therefore know a few odd things about the operation without knowing anything specific. You'll know it's delicate, personal, kind of sore in the shower and a bugger to change the dressing.

This is your last chance to turn away and read no more. What follows is going to be rather personal and you will know a little more about me than you possibly want. People who have asked me about my operation and have received an honest answer have replied "too much information".

There will be no pictures but where I need to describe things I will. Just so you know.

Ok, your choice ...

I was circumcised.

There, I've said it. I was wheeled into an operating theatre on Friday 18th November and half an hour later wheeled out again leaving my foreskin behind.

No doubt you have a mass of questions. I will try to answer what I think of as the main ones which are: why I had it done, did it hurt, and am I recovered?

So, why? Why does a 47-year-old man have a circumcision?

There are only three possible reasons that I can think of: religion, aesthetics or health.

My religious thoughts are still as nebulous as ever and I have not decided to align myself with a faith that requires this particular surgical procedure. So, it isn't that.

Is it aesthetics? You all know I am gay but I don't consider myself particularly vain. I haven't had this done because I think it will look nicer or the girls in Sex in the City say it's better. That may be the case but it wasn't a consideration.

That leaves health, the only reason I would entertain such an idea.

I have a skin condition on the head of my penis called lichen planus. It is largely controllable by steroid creams but they aren't recommended for long term use and cannot reverse the damage done by the condition over time. That damage, in my case, was the adhesion of my foreskin to the head.

To be honest, I could live with that. It wasn't covering a huge area and seemed to be under control. The problem was that the adhered skin wasn't that secure and would painfully rip at the edges at the slightest provocation. This has been going on for years but has been growing worse recently.

The only permanent solution was circumcision.

Getting the operation done took time. I had been seeing my GP for years about the lichen planus. It had had two flare-up episodes resulting in a biopsy and a course of visits to a dermatologist. The second flare-up seemed to leave the adhered foreskin in its delicate state and that led to the visit to the GP with the conclusion that circumcision was needed.

From that meeting with my GP, where we both agreed that it should be done, to seeing the consultant took 10 weeks. Then a further three or four weeks to my pre-op assessment and then another week for the operation itself.

The meeting with the consultant added little. He agreed that it should go ahead and that he would recommend that the registrars arrange the operation. He also said that for a while after the op, my penis would look like it had been "bitten by a shark" but once everything had settled down it would be "aesthetically pleasing". I put the quote marks in there because those were his exact words.

The operation itself seemed to go smoothly. I arrived at the hospital at 7:45 am and was waiting for my sister to pick me up at 11:15 am. In between, I met some lovely friendly doctors and nurses who introduced themselves to me by name (quite useless for me, I'm afraid), gave me drugs, explained what would happen. They also explained that I shouldn't drive, operate heavy machinery or sign any important documents.

There is a curious sense of security. Every time one of them came to talk to me they always and without exception checked my identity - name, date of birth and so on. Tedious in a way, but it ensured they don't operate on the wrong person, I suppose, which was all to the good.

Then they walked me off to the operating theatre. I had a cannula (one of those things they plug a drip into) put in my hand, then some sort of injection and I was asked to talk about my job. I got as far as "I program computers".

From my point of view, I had a lovely snooze and had a dream where I thought I was able to communicate directly with Facebook without the use of a computer or a phone. All that was interrupted by someone asking me to wake up. Very disorientating. It didn't occur to me until a few minutes later that the operation had finished.

After a very short while I was more or less completely awake and I was given tea and biscuits and lots of water. There was a bit of discomfort but no pain. I had visits from the nurses and from the surgeon who inspected my bright blue (why?) dressing and re-applied it. He also asked if I'd been to the loo, which I hadn't, and if I'd had a look yet. I was in the middle of a ward so the answer to that was also a no. Afterwards I heard him tell the nurse to make sure I went for a pee before I left.

Very soon I had to do that. It was all the tea and the water. It was then that I had my first look at what was left behind. I found that the surgeon had removed my foreskin ... and the bits of skin that had adhered to my glans. I wasn't expecting that. My GP had said, years before, that the skin would probably not be removed so I was pleasantly surprised to see it gone. It all looked very nice. Bloody but nice.

OK, so perhaps aesthetics did play a little part in this after all.

The trip to the loo made me lose the dressing. Well, not lose as such, but it did come off and was rather bloody. So I waddled out, trying not to get blood on my gown, and had to get the nurse to re-dress the wound. Again with the strange blue gauze.

Shortly afterwards, my sister arrived and I had to get dressed and leave.

So now what? It's been a little over a week since the op. Am I still at shark bite or have I moved on to beauty pageant?

I guess I am somewhere in between. There has been a great deal of swelling and I currently appear to have a second foreskin. That has only happened because the swollen skin has ballooned out and sort of fallen forward. The swollen skin is tender and it makes it difficult for me to keep the area hidden by it clean without causing further injury. Because of that it's possible I might have an infection and my GP has taken a swab and put me on antibiotics as a precaution.

On the whole, healing has been very slow and quite demoralising. Sleep is the worst. I usually sleep on my right side and roll on to my front. That has been out of the question, for understandable reasons, but sleeping on my back is alien to me and so I have found it difficult to sleep. That is getting better but my subconscious mind seems to like playing tricks on me while I am sleeping and I have been woken up in pain either because I have relocated myself or my penis in my sleep or it has got ideas of its own. I will say no more about that.

I am on pain medication: co-codamol four times a day and ibuprofen three. Co-codamol is apparently addictive but if it is I will have to deal with that a little later. For the moment, I need it.

I have the hang of timing the meds now. My phone's capacity for alarms has helped a great deal and I have arranged the timings so that I get six hours sleep without interruption for tablets between midnight and six in the morning. I am oddly proud of that.

That's about all I can tell you for now. As I said earlier, I have written this for anyone who is in a similar position. I don't know if it will be of any help or even if it is of interest to anyone except myself.

My final words here will be advice. If you've been told you need to do this, think about it carefully before agreeing. I don't think this is suggested lightly or often for adults so if it has been recommended then you probably do need it. If there are other options, however, then explore them. Don't take too long, though! One of my regrets is that I didn't get this done a lot earlier and I sometimes wonder if I should have insisted when the lichen planus first came to light and had it done then.

Allow for a long recovery period as well. I think the times I have been given are for a much younger man. That doesn't mean don't do it if you are my age or older - my sister-in-law's cousin had the same operation at 68! - but take the estimated times for recovery with a pinch of salt.

I will post updates later on, if and when things have settled.

Movember days twenty five to twenty seven

2011-11-27T12:35:00.001Z

Here are the last three days...

Movember days 21 to 24

2011-11-24T19:48:00.001Z

I’m off sick at the moment. More about that when I am sure that my blog is not echoed to Facebook any more!

Here are the last few days of Movembering …

Day 21

Day 22

Day 23

Day 24

Remember you can make a donation to Movember (a very worthwhile charity) via my Mospace page.

Day twenty

2011-11-20T14:18:00.001Z

Day twenty, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
And day two after operation. Just had a shower. Ouch.

Day nineteen

2011-11-19T12:14:00.001Z

Day nineteen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
The day after I had an operation! Looking surprisingly chipper despite having not had much sleep.

Day eighteen

2011-11-18T06:39:00.001Z

Day eighteen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
A bit out of focus. I had to take this one in a bit of a hurry.

Day seventeen

2011-11-18T06:38:00.001Z

Day seventeen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
There doesn't seem much difference now in the day to day shots. I think it'll need another week to make a difference to the way it looks.

Day sixteen

2011-11-16T21:57:00.001Z

Day sixteen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

It's still a surprise when I look in the mirror.

Day fifteen

2011-11-16T21:56:00.001Z

Day fifteen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Halfway!

Day fourteen

2011-11-14T22:03:00.001Z

Day fourteen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
Nearly halfway!

mobro.co/DrRobWilliams

Day thirteen

2011-11-13T14:19:00.001Z

Day thirteen, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
This is definitely looking like a moustache now

Day twelve

2011-11-12T12:27:00.001Z

Day twelve, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
Starting to look like a tache to me.

Movember days 9 to 11

2011-11-12T11:16:00.000Z

I had forgotten how slowly my moustache takes to grow. If I hadn't been obliged to continue with growing it because of the donations I have received (thanks to everyone who has given the cause money!) and because I knew I can grow one I would have given up by now.

I've had, and have enjoyed having, facial hair for years so it's a bit odd when my favourite picture of me in November was the one on day one when I was completely clean-shaven. I will think long and hard at the end of the month as to whether I regrow the beard.

Anyway, here's days nine, ten and eleven.

Rubbish swearing

2011-11-09T13:42:00.000Z

Last night when I was cycling down St Martin's Lane to Charing Cross, a couple tried to cross the road ahead of me. They saw me and reacted in different ways.

She shrieked, laughed and tried to run across the road. He was rather more sensible and decided to hang back. Either action would have been fine apart from one thing: they were holding hands and between the pair of them they made a jolly good roadblock.

So, I rang my bell, slowed down (I wasn't going very fast anyway - I'm still fairly new) and then went around them but thought that a comment was called for. However, in the heat of the moment, my vocabulary deserted me and my brain decided on the limpest rubbish to shout:

"Daft cow!"

Daft cow? Who the hell says "daft cow"?

Day eight

2011-11-08T22:17:00.003Z

Day eight, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
Looking better.

Day seven

2011-11-08T22:17:00.001Z

Day seven, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
There's something there

Day six

2011-11-06T14:23:00.001Z

Day six, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
Thought I'd smile for a change.

Day five - finally visible

2011-11-05T14:32:00.001Z

Day five - finally visible, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
Hah! I have the distance, the skin-tones and ... a semi-visible moustache.

Thank you for waiting

2011-11-04T15:50:00.000Z

"Thank you for waiting" is, I think, my current top phrase of annoyance when I am out shopping.

I encountered it once before in Uni Qlo (I think I blogged about it) when two old queens held up the one assistant by camply praising the tiles behind the till. The assistant, when he finally got to me, said "thank you for waiting" and really wasn't impressed with my response of "I didn't really have an alternative."

I popped into M&S in Oxford Street at lunchtime today to buy some emergency socks - I developed a hole in one and couldn't face the afternoon with a strangled toe. The two assistants were helping some belligerent customers and so another assistant came along and immediately said "thank you for waiting". I bit my tongue on the obvious response and did so again when I was paying for my lunch and the words drifted over to me.

Why does it annoy me?

The switch from "sorry to keep you waiting" to "thank you for waiting" is subtle but implies a rejection of any degree of ownership as to why I'm waiting. It sounds like something a management consultant has dreamed up to justify some hugely overinflated fee.

"Sorry to keep you waiting" says "we haven't enough people on the tills and we're sorry about that" whereas "thank you for waiting" says "we're doing our best but it really is your own fault for choosing this till. You saw those women. Did it look like they were going to be two minutes buying a shirt? No. You're stuck."

"Thank you for waiting" is yet another nail in the coffin of service and a refusal to accept responsibility for poor service.

Day three - there's something

2011-11-03T19:18:00.001Z

Day three - there's something, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
You'll need to look very closely but there is something there! And I don't mean the spot on my lower lip. My skin really does not like me shaving.

Such a gloomy morning. I had to use the flash on the camera. Goodness knows what the neighbours thought.

Day 2 of 30 - you will be sick of these by the end of the month

2011-11-02T19:33:00.001Z

Day 2 of 30 - you will be sick of these by the end of the month, originally uploaded by DrRob.

Via Flickr:
Well, not much different to yesterday. I don't look any happier and you can still see my warddrobe.

There is the tiniest glimmering ghost of a moustache if you know what you're looking for.

Day one

2011-11-01T20:39:00.001Z

Day one, originally uploaded by DrRob.

This is me on the first morning of Movember. According to the rules, I shaved the moustache area the night before. I have seven hours of moustache in this picture!

Operation

2011-10-31T13:32:00.000Z

I will have an operation in the not too distant future. I will spare you the details. It isn't major or for anything life-threatening and that's all you need to know.

I have been given a form to fill in as a pre-assessment. It has questions I would expect such as

Are you generally in good health?
Heart disease of any sort?
Bruising or bleeding problems?

But also odd ones, such as

How many pillows do I use at night?
How many flights of stairs can you climb before stopping to rest?
Do you get short of breath when resting or when active?

The answer I would like to give for all three of those is "it depends". It depends on how thick and firm the pillows are, how tall and steep the stairs, and how active is active. Some people obviously have a problem if they are puffed walking to the kitchen but even the fittest people are panting if they've just run a marathon.

Bloody daft questionnaire.

Movember diary - day zero

2011-10-31T08:30:00.001Z

Tomorrow is the first day of November. I am taking part in Movember, the grow a moustache for charity thing and so, today, for the first time in years, I have shaved.
We're supposed to start from scratch and start tomorrow clean-shaven. I trimmed away my beard yesterday but today was the first I'd shaved around my mouth for a long time.
It feels weird. It looks weirder. My face lacks definition and my mouth is too small.
Yesterday I marvelled at how much younger I looked without the damning white facial hair. I am only 47 but my upper lip hair is mainly white. The rest of my beard and head hair is dark. Shaving it all off made me think, yesterday, that I had lost 10 years, perhaps more.
Today I think I look like I am made out of plastic, like Bruce Willis in Surrogates or Barry Manilow in anything.
So, for the next month I will let my moustache grow and regrow my head hair (I've been shaving that for the last couple of months) and try not to look like an ageing porn star.
The end of the month will tell whether I shave the tache again or regrow the beard. Vanity or practicality?

Movember is a cause that espouses research into illnesses that affect men. Things like prostate cancer and testicular cancer. Because they're illnesses that affect males, they don't get the coverage that other illnesses get. Go to the Movember website and read about it.
While you're there, if you find my page (and there is only one Robert Williams in the UK doing this - how sad is that?) and you can spare it, bung me a couple of quid.
Better yet. Grow a moustache and raise money yourself. Now, I know the ladies will find this a bit of a challenge but you should at least try!

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Trains!

2011-10-25T08:20:00.001+01:00

Today I got to Orpington and found the 07:57 had been cancelled. No big deal. The 08:01 was sitting on platform 6 waiting to go.

But wait! Announcement ... the 08:01 was also cancelled.

The driver for the 08:01 was on the train that would become the 07:57.

Clever.

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Movember and me

2011-10-01T18:10:00.003+01:00

I have written about Movember and moustaches before in this blog. I have let Movembers come and go each year without taking part. This year will be different!

I have registered with the Movember website and plan, at the end of October, to shave off my beard and grow a moustache throughout November. I'm doing this for the fun of it but would like to raise a decent amount of money in the process.

Movember raises money for research into men's illnesses, particularly prostate cancer by encouraging men to do something intrinsically male, grow facial hair.

I know moustaches aren't popular these days. Straight men still think they are gay and gay men think they're something that died out in the eighties ... but when does it ever matter what anyone thinks?

This is a good cause, so click here to sponsor me. Better yet, if you're a man, take part! Raise some money yourself and add another moustache to the world.

Throughout Movember I plan to post regular updates to my blog, my Movember page and to Facebook. You're going to get sick of my face.

Break in service

2011-06-13T14:26:00.001+01:00

I've realised recently that I haven't been writing in my blog much in recent months. There is a good reason for this.

My main blogging time is when I'm travelling to and from work. This is also my main writing time and as I'm having a jolly good crack at my novel, the blog takes second place.

Sorry! But please look out for Remembering the Night in a year or so.

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Robert's rules for using the London Underground

2011-03-03T18:01:00.002Z

Number 1: If you have a rucksack remember to keep it on your back. Not only is it more convenient for pickpockets but your fellow travellers love the extra room it takes up and the way it bashes into them every time you move. Don't feel it at all necessary to, oh, I don't know, take it off.
Number 2: Do remember to hold your Oyster card on the reader for as long as you can. You don't need to, of course, a simple short touch as instructed is enough but why waste an opportunity to make the reader have an error just as the person following tries to use their card? There's nothing commuters like better than being held up at the gate, looking a complete tit while a million people stand angrily behind them cursing their stupidity while you swan off in the knowledge of a job well done. Really, they'll thank you!

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Time

2011-02-02T23:35:00.001Z

The passage of time has always been a bit of a surprise for me. It's always with a sense of shock that I realise that it has been weeks since I have done a particular activity or months since I have spoken to someone.
I was particularly surprised to realise that this month marks the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death.
Twenty years.
That's nearly half my life. Yet if I think of the early nineties, the era seems recent like it was only a couple of years ago and not a couple of decades. People have been born and grown up in that time and yet it seems hardly the blink of an eye to me.
I suppose this is just evidence of getting older. Time passes. Each year of my life forms a smaller fraction of it and so passes more quickly. When I was 5, a year was a massive fifth of my life and each one is now little more than a fiftieth.
I'm not complaining. It's just the same for everyone else. It's just odd how we perceive time.

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Snow

2010-12-01T10:21:00.001Z

It snowed in Orpington yesterday and today. It took me two and a half hours to get home last night on a train that was, at first, overfull and then, once emptier, slow as it was forced to stop at every signal between Lewisham and Orpington.

When I got to Orpington there were no buses so I had to walk home along with many other people picking their way gingerly across the frozen impacted snow. There were more people walking than normal all in a spread out line, like a walking bus for adults.

There were a lot of abandoned vehicles on the way home. I would expect that on country roads further out from the city but I can’t remember seeing that around here before. It was a bit of a surprise.

There were still abandoned cars and vans this morning as well as the odd dropped glove.

The thing that really surprised me was the pair of underpants I noticed on the pavement.

The Eighties

2010-11-25T14:03:00.001Z

Following the announcement of next year's Royal wedding, there has been a lot of public comparisons between the 2010s and the 1980s. There are similarities, of course, but I don't feel like I've been thrown back 30 years. Thank goodness.

Back in 1980 I was a greasy-haired skinny 16-year-old with terrible skin and terminal shyness. Now I'm a bald fat 46-year-old gay bloke with slightly better skin and mild social avoidance issues.

In many senses, I grew up in the Eighties, as far as I could. I don't really feel like a grown-up even now but that decade saw me become vaguely human. A lot happened to me in that time which I might relate at another day but it all helped shape me. At least I left the decade with cleaner hair.

My memories are vague. I know what happened but none of it feels particularly "Eighties" if you know what I mean. I could tell you I started at Thames Poly in 1982 but none of my college memories have the stamp of that time or any other era on them.

My memories of the music of the time, however, definitely have a feel to them. It was the time when I really began to discover music and it was definitely of the Eighties.

I didn't actually like music much before 1979. I was vaguely embarrassed by it and couldn't see what my peers saw in it. It just didn't figure in my world. Music and fashion were things that happened to other people.

The end of the Seventies and beginning of the Eighties, however, brought me music in the form of promotional videos on Top of the Pops. Those videos, particularly ones using science fiction and fantasy themes, struck a chord in me.

Although a later massive Queen fan (just ask me how many times I've seen We Will Rock You!) I was completely underimpressed with their influential video for Bohemian Rhapsody in the seventies and yet completely captivated in '79 with the one for Hazel O'Connor's Eighth Day. It was part of a much longer film, of course, Breaking Glass, which I enjoyed many years later contrary to the tastes of the younger me. The video had the stage show that Kate (O'Connor's role in the film) performed at the peak, and end, of her career. It's a poignant moment in the film but taken out of context it's full of imagery and lyrics that would impress an impressionable 16-year-old. Glowing robotic woman? Check. Backing group with glowing eyes? Check. Pseudo-religious post-apocalyptic lyrics? Check.

Video Killed The Radio Star was similarly fascinating. Although I am gay now and probably was at the time as well, there was something about futuristically dressed women flying up and down clear plastic tubes in the middle of some laboratory had me buying the record.

The extract from the film Xanadu accompanying the titular single did nothing to distract me from the awfulness of the film (not seen until many years later by the way) but featured glowing flying Muses and flashing lights.

Other striking imagery caught me as well. I was desperate to buy anything by Adam and the Ants after I saw the video for Stand and Deliver and again later for Prince Charming, even though I thought the dance rather silly.

So, a pattern was set ... Any old bit of rubbish with good visuals. Nice video, shame about the song, as Not The Nine O'Clock News put it at the time. I knew it was crap but it looked good and sounded fun.

That said, by the time I was into Adam and the Ants, I was starting to listen to and appreciate the lyrics, many of which had a resonance with an introverted teen although a lot of them now make little sense. Just take a listen to Red Box sometime.

I even started liking other stuff for which I hadn't seen a video and probably, in hindsight, was still crap but appeared to my musical sensibilities at the time. That's how I ended up with Einstein-a-gogo and Japanese Boy, both of which I loved at the time and both are on my iPod although I wince a little when Japanese Boy is randomly selected and look around for the Political Correctness Police.

Throughout the decade there were many groups and singers that caught my attention - Human League, Eurythmics, Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, Yazoo, OMD, Blancmange, Toyah, Matt Bianco ... I could go on forever.

There were other songs which didn't really impact on me at the time but formed part of the backdrop for the decade. I have largely forgotten until I hear them on one of the many compilation CDs and find them triggering some fond memory.

One such was actually a great favourite: The Mobiles and Drowning in Berlin. It turned up on a compilation CD which I had to buy. I loved being able to hear it again.

I played that CD in the car while I was giving some younger colleagues a lift to a course. Surprisingly they liked everything on that CD except that one track which they decided was "evil clown music".

I suppose my odd and eclectic tastes haven't changed all that much after all. The shy 16-year-old must still lurk somewhere in my head. At least he's washed his hair.

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Soft corns

2010-11-14T13:56:00.001Z

This has been a hard blog to write. I’ve had to start this two or three times. That’s because I’m not planning a rant or trying to write something funny or just saying the first thing that pops into my mind.

This time, I’m trying to write something helpful and, for most of my regular readers, this will be completely irrelevant. If you’re looking for some of my usual stuff, stop reading now. Normal service will be resumed later.

I’m aiming this at anyone who has itchy feet and doesn’t know why.

And by that I don’t mean you have wanderlust and you want to move house, change your job or your relationship. I really do mean feet that itch. Specifically feet that itch for no visible reason.

I know there is very little to be found on the internet for this because I looked for it. I have had a couple of episodes of this problem myself. The first was a few years ago and the second right now. The internet was no help at all.

My feet look perfectly normal. There are no strange growths on my feet, no warts, no spots, no discoloration but there is an itch. Or rather, itches, and itches that don’t stay in the same place. There is nothing obvious to point to and say “aha, a verruca” before applying some suitable cream from the pharmacist.

Does that sound like you? Do you have feet that itch? Does the itch move around?

I know this isn’t a serious problem and there are much worse things in life to suffer. This is one of those things that you just put up with because there’s nothing to see and it is only an itch, after all. It’s an itch that strikes at you whenever you take pressure off your feet, an itch that won’t stop no matter what you scratch it with, an itch that tempts you to slip off your shoes whenever you think anyone is not looking and have a bloody good scratch.

When it first struck me, I became rather desperate and tried several solutions before doing the obvious thing and going to a podiatrist. I did feel silly though. After all there was nothing to see.

It took a bit of investigation with him peering at my feet with very powerful magnifying glasses but it eventually turned out I had soft corns under the skin on the soles of my feet. They were just large enough to cause a itch but not large enough to be visible or be felt. The podiatrist, Toby, was able to remove them all within a few visits and give me pointers to help me prevent them returning.

They were probably caused by my feet rubbing against my slightly ill-fitting shoes. Toby gave me some insoles and later I managed to find shoes that fit me better.

I was free of them for years and then, all of a sudden they were back, itching away like anything and driving me barmy. I would find myself rubbing my feet on the sharp edges of the coffee table as I watched TV or slipping my socks off at work for a bloody good scratch. I had forgotten that I had recently had to say goodbye to a lovely pair of very comfortable shoes which obviously had kept the corns at bay.

So I made a return visit to see Toby and he removed the corns again. Most of them. He can’t get them all at once and I can feel there’s at least one left behind.

He mentioned that he’d had one other patient with the same problem since he last saw me and that, as soon as she mentioned that she had an invisible itch on her feet, he remembered me and was able to treat her quickly and easily.

That’s why I decided to write this. I was sort of indirectly able to help this woman. There is bound to be someone else trying to find a solution to the same problem.

Go to a podiatrist or a chiropodist, tell them about your itchy feet and mention soft corns.

What a rubbish day

2010-11-11T08:43:00.001Z

I was in such an unbelievably foul mood last night that I actually caught myself snarling at people getting in my way on the concourse and I really didn't care if I bashed into anyone.

I had become one of those people I shake my head at. Had I been dressed in Burberry I could have been a chav.

I was still simmering with rage as I was sitting on the train. Actually, it took me a few hours to calm down.

Nothing justifies such a dramatic change in character of course and I don't like myself in that mood. I feel madly dangerous and expect to find myself on the front page of the newspapers the following day and not for a good reason.

I think I had been pushed a little too far.

I had spent all day tracking down solutions to two problems for a major customer. That customer had been sending snotty emails demanding updates when it turned out that one of the problems had been their fault and the other had been solved the day before.

My day had been completely wasted. The really urgent work I wanted to be doing had to be sidelined yet again.

I hate my time being wasted. I hate support. I hate stupid users. I am a developer for a reason.

My job is deeply annoying at the moment.

I say job, singular, but it isn't. I seem to have at least four and splitting my time between them just isn't working. I am supposed to be a developer, a project manager, a team leader and support.

Also I am on the Entertainments Committee tasked with organising "lively" events for people who couldn't give a toss.

I have dozens of half-started jobs on the go that I have to put to one side because something more urgent comes along. I don't work well like that. I have no time to get anything finished. I don't seem to have enough time to get anything started.

On top of that, Transport for London have taken £1904 for my annual Travelcard, forced me to use the tube (which I hate) so the Travelcard could be loaded onto my Oyster card at Charing Cross and failed to deliver.

I was told to try again tomorrow. At the other Charing Cross tube station. How bloody ridiculous.

I don't normally go on the tube. My travelcard is for trains and buses. The tube is hot and filled with people who don't know their arses from their elbows and who stand in the way because they are too gormless to have any awareness of their surroundings.

No wonder I was growling.

I'm in a much better frame of mind this morning but I have decided I need to speak to someone at work. I really shouldn't be doing support. I shouldn't be working with people at all.

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Cycling

2010-11-05T12:19:00.001Z

Just recently I have been cycling around London. After not cycling at all since I was 10, I have had a lesson, bought a bike hire key from Transport for London and subscribed to a year’s access to the nice blue Boris Bikes dotted around London.

And largely I have enjoyed myself cycling to and from work. It has been great fun and I will continue to do it.

There are a few problems with the scheme, of course. If you don’t time it well, you will arrive at one of the docking stations and there will be no useable bikes. Or, alternatively, you can be riding a bike and there will be nowhere to dock it at the other end.

Those are only minor niggles. I can usually find another bike somewhere close by or a spare docking station and, now that the novelty has worn off, bikes and slots are more readily available. I also have a nice little app on my new phone that tells me what’s available.

I think my major problem with cycling has been the other people on the roads.

It’s not what you might expect, however. Buses, taxis and cars have all been, so far, absolutely fine.

The biggest problems have come from pedestrians and other cyclists.

Cyclists, by and large, do not seem to follow the Highway Code. They will jump red lights. They will overtake on the inside. They will overtake on the outside. They will overtake on both sides at once. That has happened to me while on a bike. Scared me silly.

Pedestrians are worse, however. They will look directly at you and continue to walk into the road. One woman looked at me and I moved to avoid her. She moved further out. So did I. I ended up on the other side of the road. What did she expect me to do? Stop? Get off the bike and dust the road for her?

Isn’t going to stop me though.

Men are the weaker sex

2010-11-03T12:53:00.001Z

Yet again there’s an article about poor health in men: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11674950

And yet again, the implication is raised that men are responsible for this by not going to their GPs when they are ill as well as, of course, eating badly, drinking too much, smoking too much and not exercising enough.

It is a rather more balanced article than ones I have read in the past but still doesn’t address the issue that a man going to their GP with concerns will be made to feel like they shouldn’t be there.

It’s all very well to advise us to visit our doctors but rather pointless when they don’t want to see us when we get there.

Isn't technology marvelous?

2010-10-16T13:14:00.001+01:00

I'm writing this blog on my new phone. This is more a test of the technology than an actual blog posting. Csn it be done? We shall see.

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Robert’s guide to not being annoying in the theatre

2010-08-23T22:35:00.002+01:00

Before I start, I shall point out straightaway that I commented on this exact same topic this time last year. No doubt I shall comment on it again. Last time the comment was a footnote in a longer posting but now I’ve decided on a larger canvas. I shall probably repeat myself in writing this but it needs saying.

Why is it that people do not know how to behave in the theatre?

I don’t mean whether to stand up for the right parts of Mamma Mia! but in simple courtesy both to the performers and to the other people in the audience. People can be so rude.

David and I have just come back from the final week of this year’s Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton. The shows were good and every one we saw was an excellent production. I’m not going to review them here. Other people have, no doubt, made a much better job elsewhere.

There were, however, a few flies in the ointment. The audience seemed to have no concept of where they were. Most seemed to think that they were at home watching television and behaved accordingly. I am surprised that people hadn’t turned up in their dressing-gowns with a mug of cocoa.

I thought it might help if I laid down a few guidelines …

If you’re in the front row of the circle, you will have probably been sold a ticket with the words “restricted view” on it. This means that there is a wall and a railing and if you are below a certain height you should really aim to get other seats. It doesn’t mean that you have to lean forward on the nice comfy railing and block the views of the people behind you with your head. Justifying it with “we’re short” really doesn’t wash. You shouldn’t be sitting there.
If you find someone in your seat ask politely to check their tickets. Don’t assume they’ve sat in the wrong seats. It might be you. Don’t imply that they weren’t able to read the numbers properly or that knowing the difference between A and AA is “confusing”. You just come across to the people sitting behind you as a patronising cow.
If you must eat sweets during the performance, please make sure they don’t have wrappers. It’s amazing how far the sound of rustling carries. We could clearly hear the sound of some woman unwrapping a couple of sweets with exquisite slowness four rows in front of us. Doing it slowly doesn’t help. Just don’t do it.
The same goes for water bottles. By all means drink water but don’t sit there squeezing the bottle and making that lovely clicky noise.
And while we’re on the subject of water – buy a bottle either before the show starts or comfortably during the interval. Waiting until 19 minutes and 55 seconds into a 20 minute interval before deciding you are thirsty is verging on stupidity.
A little tip – the music and the singing are not there to cover up the sound of you having a chat with your neighbour. A word here or there is just about OK but having a prolonged discussion is just not on and we can still hear you whispering.
If you suddenly realise that there isn’t a full orchestra when you were expecting one, please don’t bellow “there’s no orchestra!” at the top of your voice. The actors on the stage probably already know.
Bring children – yes. Bring children that are too young to appreciate what they are seeing or to not chatter at the tops of their voices – no. Bring one or two children – yes. Bring every child in your extended family – no. Iolanthe may be about fairies but it isn’t intended for children.

Going to the theatre, a concert or even the cinema is not the same as sitting at home watching television. There are other people there. The other people have paid good money to see and hear the production, whether it is a play, an opera, a dance or a film. They haven’t paid to see the back of your head or the lovely cardigan that Aunty Mabel knitted or to listen to your whispering.

The Puppini Sisters

2010-08-13T12:53:00.002+01:00

For those who don’t know them, The Puppini Sisters are a trio of women who sing in the close harmony style that was popular in the 1940s. Their repertoire covers hits from the era as well as more recent songs adapted for the style. Their albums have "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" rubbing shoulders with "Wuthering Heights" or "Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree" following "Walk Like an Egyptian". It is not a combination that you think would work immediately but when you hear it you find it works very well indeed.

I’ve been a huge fan ever since David gave me their first CD (Betcha Bottom Dollar) for Christmas. I listened to it on the drive down to the Kent coast to see my family for Christmas and I had a big grin on my face all the way. By the time I got there, I was so in love with the album I could talk about little else.

I would love to see them cover a few other modern pieces. Matt Bianco’s "Get Out Your Lazy Bed" could be interesting, for instance, and would suit their style. Some of Jill Sobule’s numbers would work well, I think. I can just imagine them with "The Resistance Song". Actually, I could just imagine them singing with Jill. What a show that would be!

Last night, David and I went with a collection of people from work to see the girls at the Cadogan Hall where they had been loosely slotted into its Hits from the Blitz week. I was worried that they might restrict their set to purely songs from the 1940s but fortunately they chose an eclectic selection from both Betcha Bottom Dollar and The Fall and Rise of Ruby Woo as well as some new material that enabled each of the trio to show off their respective skills.

What was great about seeing them in concert was that, for the first time, I could see them as individuals and not as pictures on a CD cover and a group of anonymous voices. Personalities emerged.

Marcella (Puppini) is the small dark haired sultry one who looks vaguely like a young Maureen Lipman. She wore a red outfit with a huge puffy half skirt that swished around like some huge tail.

The other two are, shock, horror, not really her sisters. Kate Mullins is the blonde one and she has a wicked sense of humour (“Now we have a song from one of the best American composers of the last 150 years … Beyoncé Knowles” ) and, as well as singing, plays the Melodica, an instrument that I haven’t seen since Primary School. She played it to good effect, however. She was largely the group’s spokeswoman introducing the solo performances for the other two.

Stephanie O’Brien was a powerhouse of energy and strutted around the stage filling it with enthusiasm and red hair. She also played a weird S-shaped electric violin. She smiled a lot and very genuinely. She had a fantastic solo number and had the audience in the palm of her hand.

All three girls looked stunning and had lovely long legs which were probably lost on large portions of the male members of the audience. The audience were, it has to be said, a bit of a mixed bag. I couldn’t make up my mind whether they were fully representative of the Puppini Sisters’ fans. There were girls dressed in 1940s finery with one even wearing a land girl type scarf. There were older men and women who may have been there as Puppini followers but it was just as likely that they were there as Forties fans. And there were, to my surprise, lots of gay men. I hadn’t realised the Puppini Sisters had a gay following other than me and David.

The front row seemed to the Puppini Sisters Fan Club with one man practically floating out of his seat when they directed mock ire at him for "I Will Survive".

There were some male Sisters on the stage as well: Blake Wilner on guitar, Henrik Jensen on double bass and Pat Levett on drums. They were a little too loud at the beginning but that was largely down to the balancing of the sound engineer who, for some strange reason, seemed to favour the instruments over the voices. I was struggling to hear any of the vocals. It did spoil the first number for me and for most of the other members of the audience but a proper balance was achieved and we were able to hear the wonderful voices that we had paid to hear.

It was a great evening which ended on a lovely high note when we dragged the six of them back on stage for an encore and they sang Glen Miller’s "In The Mood". They had us sing the refrain “in the mood” at various points and Henrik and Blake danced around with some very impressive gravity defying stamping.

Where’s the next album, ladies?

Tourists?

2010-07-29T12:33:00.001+01:00

Whenver I visit somewhere, I always take the time to have a look around, to see whatever local sights there are and to get a feel for the place. Even when I go to a convention, I go out and have a look around. I take the view that, if I have taken the time and trouble to travel somewhere, it seems wrong to spend all day and night in the one building. I might just as well have stayed at home.

In a way, I feel I am doing the place I am visiting a disservice or even insulting it by not seeing at least some of it. Here is a fabulous new city to see, filled with buildings, beautiful or otherwise, rivers, art and people. It deserves better than to be ignored.

I know that not everyone shares this view. I often get the bus from Trafalgar Square up to Tottenham Court Road. At Leicester Square, a large group of Chinese tourists board the bus and get off at the same stop as me. Every single one then crosses the road and goes straight into the casino.

I have a horrible feeling that they spend all day there before going back to their hotel and coming back the following day. They are here in London for a gambling holiday.

I've been in a casino. It wasn't that exciting and certainly wasn't worth getting there for nine o'clock in the morning. It also wasn't worth ignoring a culturally rich city that I'd travelled halfway across the world to get to.

Bus stop etiquette

2010-06-10T13:51:00.001+01:00

I have fallen into the habit of getting the bus in the morning to the station. I could walk but if I pass the bus stop and see there is a bus within 5 minutes it isn’t really worth walking any further.

Using the bus has turned into a mini-project in behavioural psychology, however, in watching where people stand and why.

For instance, the bus stop I normally use, has a matrix display telling you when the next bus is due. It is mounted about 12” inside the shelter. This means that people naturally stand about halfway along the shelter so they can keep their eye on the time of the bus.

Anyone arriving at the stop after this person who obeys the British instinct to queue (Am. = “stand in line”) will stand behind them but leave a further distance between them than they would normally. This pattern will be repeated for subsequent joiners, even if it is raining.

Incidentally, one time I stood under the shelter behind a woman standing in the middle of the shelter thing while she had her umbrella up. Mad.

It takes a lot of resolve to not stand in sight of the display but once its done people follow the normal queuing pattern.

At shelters without a matrix display there is a tendency to queue normally unless there is some aggravating factor.

The next stop along, for instance, has the shelter some distance from the stop and at an angle. This completely screws up the Great British queuing instinct and people are all over the place.

The stop at the station on the way home has limited space and barriers at the end. [ The station is a sort of bus garage and the barriers are there to stop passengers getting anywhere near an off-duty bus because they bite. ] So there people start to queue until the queue reaches the barrier and then they try to fill in the gaps or stand around at the other end of the bus stop “island”.

I’m sure there’s a PhD in this for someone.

That sounded ok to me but not to Europe

2010-06-09T08:50:00.002+01:00

The 2010 Eurovision Song Contest has come and gone. It’s probably a bit late for me to write about it now and I wasn’t going to bother posting this but some letters in this week’s RadioTimes have prompted me to post this after all.
Here I attempt to answer the eternal question: what happened to the UK?
What went wrong?
I should say that I did actually like our song but I am a huge fan of Eighties music and our song definitely had the stamp of the Eighties on it. It would not have sounded out of place as a early Kylie, a Sonia or as a Rick Astley number. If we’d entered it in 1987 we would have won hands down. Unfortunately, this is 2010 and the people of Eurovision-land weren’t impressed.
The Great British public had no choice over the song this year but we did have a choice of singer. Last year we had a selection process lasting weeks; this year we had one evening. Last year we had a song from Andrew Lloyd Webber (but again no choice); this year Pete Waterman. Last year we came fifth; this year we were last out of twenty five.
Although we had a choice of singers, I wasn’t impressed with any of the acts that were presented to us to choose from and I really wondered where they had been found. It seemed that the producers had run outside and grabbed random groups of strangers, regardless of personality or talent. I think there was a girl group pulled together especially for the evening. They didn’t know each other and it showed. The singer chosen, Josh, was agreeable enough but he was the best of a bad lot, unfortunately. We could have done a lot better.
Thirdly, and this cannot be stated in a polite way unfortunately, the backing singers on the night were flat.
What went right?
I enjoyed the songs a lot more on the CD than on television in either of the semi-finals or the final itself. I guess that just goes to show that everything benefits from a bit of a post-production tweak here and there. I should also say that I enjoyed the winning song from Germany – it was one of my favourites before I saw the show and even if some of the singer’s pronunciation was dodgy to say the least, I think it deserved to win. Lena’s performance only enhanced the song and captured the attention of the camera and the audience.
Incidentally, our selection process usually garners criticism from around Europe. It has been said in the past that we never take the contest seriously because we have people chosen by talent contest rather than using established professional performers. That simply does not hold water now – several other countries selected their performers selected their singers this way this year and, indeed, Lena, the German singer, was chosen through a talent show.
The usual excuse for the UK getting nowhere is that the voting system is biased and that countries will vote for their neighbours and friends. I have seen this trotted out again this year but, really, I don’t think that’s the case now. The recent changes to the voting system seem to have made it a lot fairer and less inclined to bias – again, how could Germany have won if everyone was voting for their bestest fwiends? Of course, there will always be Greece and Cyprus but splitting them up will take something more radical than the Eurovision organisers could devise.
Another reason that Germany won was because they got their song noticed. They picked it and then put it in the charts around Europe where it did very well. Did we do anything similar? I didn’t even hear a mention of our song between the night it was picked and when the Eurovision CD came out.
Germany’s song was also cleverly written with elements from the various countries around the Eurovision zone making themselves known without sounding like a slavish copy. How many violins did we see this year? How many copied Turkey the year after they won? Satellite’s dominant beat hinted at the dominant beats of some of the Eastern entries but lacked the other elements that make them sound so similar.
The rest of the song was a rather upbeat number about the madness of love and was sung joyfully by a girl with a lovely smile. No wonder it did well.
Next Year
We should learn from this year. It is possible for us to do better although I can understand us not wanting to win. These things are expensive to host and we’re already paying another huge event, the 2012 Olympics so perhaps we don’t want to win. National pride, however, demands we do better than last.

Men in a bucket

2010-06-04T10:10:00.001+01:00

This morning when I got off the train and left Charing Cross station, I heard raised voices. Looking around I couldn’t see much other than a lot of stationary traffic on the Strand because there was a gridlock at the roundabout in Trafalgar Square.

I thought maybe that some of the drivers were having a bit of a heated argument. Then I realised that the shouting was coming from above and looked up.

There were two guys in a window cleaner’s cradle hanging over the edge shouting “oi!” at people.

I wondered what they were doing and went through the options:

shouting at girls – possibly
shouting at boys – less likely but still possible
Fathers for Justice – possible but there was no banner

Further up the road I looked again and they seemed to be shouting at me. Odd, I thought, and looked at my reflection in a window. Nope – nothing out of the ordinary – at least nothing that would need shouting at from high up.

I shrugged and carried on walking to work.

It was only when I was a lot further on that it occurred to me that they might have been trying to get people’s attention because they were stuck although I think, if that were the case, they would have done better to have banged on the windows of the building or maybe shouted something other than “oi!”.

“Help!” probably would have been a good idea.

Of course, they could have just been shouting at people for the fun of it. Will we ever know?

Dyson hand dryers

2010-05-24T20:31:00.002+01:00

You know those new Dyson airblade hand dryers? They’re meant to be more efficient and dry your hands a lot quicker. They have a simple set of instructions printed in very basic pictures on the top. There are two:

Insert wet hands
Draw out slowly over 10 seconds.

The idea is that the air from the dryer both pushes most of the water off the hands as you draw them out and dry the remainder with hot air. Simple.

Why then do most men do this … ?

Insert hands quickly.
Draw out just as quickly.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 until the drier stops.
Walk off complaining that it doesn’t work.

Is it the usual male thing of not reading instructions, I wonder? Even instructions that have two steps and are diagrams anyway? Or is it the male thing about knowing better?

Is it just men who are this stupid?

The Mallen Patch

2010-05-24T19:54:00.002+01:00

When I was a teenager, there was a period drama on television called “The Mallens” which was adapted from a book called “The Mallen Streak”. All that I remember of this show was that members of the Mallen family all had characteristic black hair with a white streak running up from the forehead. This was the Mallen Streak.

I have a Mallen Patch. It grows in my beard on the left hand side of my face and is an almost exact square with each side about an inch and a half in length. This has troubled me for a while. What should I do with it?

For a time, I tried trimming the top edge down so that I just had the bit along the jaw. I wasn’t keen on that. For one thing it is a terrible job to keep the beard symmetrical and for another if made me look like I was a used-car salesman who’d just escaped from 1978.

So I decided to grow the sides back a couple of weeks ago. The memory of my Mallen Patch had faded and I thought that it couldn’t really be as bad as I thought.

Wrong! It was worse. Amidst the darker hair the white square loomed like a beacon.

I don’t mind going grey. I have a lot of grey and white scattered around my beard as it is. I think though, that having a white square on my cheek looks a bit silly. So for the moment I have a goatee again.

That will remain until I get bored with it, get irritated with shaving, make a mistake with the trimming or forget how bad my Mallen Patch looks.

Bill and … hang on a minute

2010-04-27T10:26:00.001+01:00

Someone has stolen one (or perhaps two) of the plant pots from my front garden. It wasn’t expensive and didn’t contain anything grand. I’m not even that upset that they’ve taken it. I only noticed when I stepped out of my house this morning and thought my front garden looked a bit sparse.

I’m just really puzzled. I mean, it’s a plant pot, why bother?

You mean it isn’t International Dress Like a Pimp Day?

2010-04-19T09:24:00.001+01:00

Tonight I will be going out after work to see Mamma Mia! so I have dressed up a bit; I’m wearing a proper jacket, black trousers and a black shirt. I thought it worked when I looked in the mirror but, as I left the house, the uneasy thought popped into my head that I looked like a 1970s pimp.

As I took a few steps down the road I began to realise, as well, that the new trousers I bought were just a shade on the wrong side of snug and the “pimp” thought began to well and truly bed in.

The thought was magnified by the “naked” feeling I get whenever I go somewhere without my laptop bag, which I decided to leave behind because I was going out, and then further by someone at the bus-stop giving me a very peculiar look.

As I waited for the bus, that thought ran round my head, “I am dressed like a pimp”, but by then it was too late and I decided to brazen it out, walking brazenly onto the bus and then on to the train.

It was only when I sat down that I realised why the bloke at the bus-stop had given me a funny look.

My flies were undone.

Fingernails 3

2010-04-13T13:30:00.001+01:00

How on earth do you keep the blessed things clean?

And why does my left thumbnail grow so slowly?

Fingernails – part two

2010-04-12T15:04:00.001+01:00

I haven’t bitten my nails in over a week. 10 days in fact. I do still desperately want to bite them but I don’t.

It is partly due to the horrible tasting paint but, oddly, partly due to the fact that I actually have white ends to my fingernails for the first time in living memory and knowing that if I bite them they (and the pride in knowing I haven’t bitten them) won’t be there anymore.

To answer Nigel’s earlier question from the original nail biting post – I think the taste of the paint varies from product to product. The one I have been using (I don’t have it with me and I can’t remember what it’s called) is more unpleasant than horrible on a subjective scale and it’s more of an aftertaste than a taste. It’s reminiscent of the way your mouth feels the morning after you’ve eaten a curry and you’ve been sleeping with your mouth open all night.

One downside of having nails for once is that when I scratch my head I have to be careful . It can actually hurt now.

Nail biting

2010-04-06T12:20:00.001+01:00

I bite my nails.

There, I’ve said it. I have confessed. I am nearly 46 and I bite my nails.

This is not a habit I particularly like or want and, when a colleague of mine mentioned that he was trying out something to help him stop, I thought I would give it a try.

I bought something from Boots. It took a bit of finding as it wasn’t anywhere I would expect and in the end I had to ask someone who led me to the manicure section. I, with my man’s brain, never notice these areas and didn’t know such a thing existed. I was looking in more medical areas.

It was the right stuff as well as it said right at the bottom of the label at the back that it could be used by men to help them stop biting their nails. You’re supposed to paint it on and then whenever you take a bite you get a nasty taste in the mouth.

I have been using it for a few days and I have to say that it feels silly to paint this stuff on. It is colourless but makes my nails as shiny as anything so, of course, I worry that people will notice.

That said, it seems to be working. I haven’t bitten my nails since I started using it. It is partly to do with the bad taste but is probably more to do with the odd feeling on my nails. I can feel something there and it makes me aware enough of my nails to make me less likely to absent-mindedly bite them.

I also find that putting any part of my finger anywhere near my mouth seems to result in either a nasty taste or the anticipation of a nasty taste and prevents me from, say, digging around in my mouth for something caught in my teeth. This is another bad habit of mine so it probably isn’t a bad thing although having second thoughts about flossing probably isn’t such a good idea.

Geeky stuff

2010-03-18T13:22:00.001Z

I have quite a large collection of books. I went though a very long phase of buying (and reading, mostly) a lot of science fiction books. I have about 1500.

I soon realised that I would encounter a problem when I went book-shopping and that is I would forget what I already owned and buy it again. I needed some sort of catalogue.

And so I created a database.

Of course, at the time I didn’t have access to any of the tools that would have made the job a whole lot easier. I remember the early versions were slow, clunky and horribly convoluted. I eventually had something set up in Access 2000 which did the job but could have been better.

Better has arrived. I have transferred the database to SQL Server and written a completely new and swish front-end in C#.

It looks tons better and is way simpler to use. I can add details for a book. I can assign it any number of authors. I can put it in a series. All that I could do before but now I can check to see if there are any orphaned records (books that don’t have an author and series that don’t have any books).

It’s been very absorbing doing this. I do this sort of thing for a living but this has been for fun. And I’ve not had to write a design or a requirements spec or a user guide. I am the user and the designer and the tester and …

Anyway, it’s been fun but I have nearly finished.

Back to the novel, I suppose.

Unsuccessful charity collectors

2010-03-18T12:27:00.001Z

Probably the woman who was trying to collect for charity at Orpington Station this morning went home and had a good old moan about how uncharitable people were at the station today.

Maybe she would have had more luck if she had not been wearing a full-length fur coat.

Leaving aside the issue as to whether the coat was real or fake (I couldn’t tell), I wonder what went through the woman’s mind when she decided to wear it? Fur coats (real or fake) are intended for two things: (1) to keep you warm (it wasn’t cold this morning) and (2) to give the impression that you are loaded.

Wearing a fur coat and trying to collect for charity was a bit of a mistake. The people she wanted money from would either be thinking she’s rich enough to put money in the bucket herself or that the next bucketload would be used to enhance her wardrobe.

Last night with Jill

2010-03-03T15:38:00.001Z

Last night I went to the Troubadour in Earl’s Court to see Jill Sobule sing.

I have been wanting to see her perform for such a long time and I cannot begin to describe how excited I was leading up to the show. Imagine I was five and I’d just been told that Santa was coming to visit and that he was the real thing, not one of these shop imitations and you’d be somewhere close.

I am normally the least impressed by anyone who is famous. I could see the Queen in Sainsbury’s and not bat an eyelid and I have seen plenty of famous people around where I work and other than thinking “oh that’s so and so” I am not impressed. They are just people after all. I see them on TV or in the papers but so what?

Jill, however, is different. I like her music. I like the way she sings. The lyrics and the tunes and the fragile yet immensely strong quality of her voice speak to me in a way that many others don’t.

I could not pass up the opportunity to see her.

Did I regret it? Was she good? She was absolutely fantastic. She could turn me straight. No, just kidding. She was good though.

The venue could only be described as small and intimate but I think it suited Jill’s act and we, well I, felt more connected with her than if she had been on a huge stage in a massive auditorium filled with a sea of people. Jill deserves that sort of fame but hopefully not just yet.

I wasn’t in a good enough position to properly appreciate Jill’s support act, Erin Williams. She had a similar strong/weak quality to her voice and I would probably like to hear more at another time but I was there to hear and see Jill. People carried on talking while Erin was on but even they stopped when Jill stepped onto the stage and smiled at us and sang.

All of her stuff I had heard before but hearing it live and seeing her standing in front of me gave it all another dimension. The time just passed in this really happy haze where she would start playing something and it would be a little while before my brain worked out what it was and what a great arrangement this was.

Let's see what I can remember - she played Heroes, Trains, Bitter, I Kissed a Girl, Nothing to Prove, Where is Bobbie Gentry?, A Good Life, Wendell Lee, Angel/Asshole, Mexican Wrestler and a million others. She finished her set but was having such a great time with us that we got her to sing five other songs, ending on I Kissed a Girl, threatening to sing the Katy Perry version, but doing the proper one.

She had us sing along to a few things as well … Nothing to Prove works well with audience participation as does Bobbie Gentry. It didn’t do my voice any favours (I still have a bit of a cough) but that didn’t matter. I bellowed along with everyone else.

I managed to speak to her afterwards and got her to sign a copy of Pink Pearl. I told her that Rainy Day Parade was my favourite song but that I'm not good enough at shouting to get her to sing it. I'm too British and, besides, at the moment I probably would have ended up shouting "Rainy! *cough* *COUGH*" which probably wouldn't have worked. In any case, I could think of a dozen more “favourites” which I would have loved her to sing had either of us the time or the lung power. Karen by *cough* would have been good or Sanfran *cough* co or even Big *coughs*.

If she's playing anywhere near you, go see her. You won't regret it. She was kidding about moving to London. Possibly. I think she was kidding. A little bit of me is hoping she was serious.

Oooh! - sorry went a bit camp there - she was interviewed by "whispering" Bob Harris yesterday afternoon and sang some songs on his show. That will be broadcast on Saturday night on BBC Radio 2. Have a listen.

Money?

2010-03-01T14:19:00.001Z

For the last few months, I have been in the surprising position of having a positive balance in my bank account just before I am paid.

I have described already how I have cut back here and there and changed this, rescheduled that and generally not spent as much so I shouldn’t be surprised. However, my calculations indicated that I should be only just above breaking even. My balance suggests otherwise. I have way more than I think I should have in the bank.

A smug me would say “woo-hoo! it’s all working! let’s go shopping!” but the more realistic me is thinking that he has forgotten something.

Twenty-first Century Fairy Tales

2010-02-18T20:43:00.001Z

We all remember the tooth fairy, the mythical creature that would take the discarded teeth left under our pillows and replace them with money.

I'd like to postulate some modern ones.

There is the Tangle Fairy, the creature responsible for creeping into your pocket and tying up your iPod headphone cables. It also, in its spare time, mangles the Christmas Tree lights every year just before you bring them down from the loft.

The Tangle Fairy is related to the Shoelace Pixie, who untie shoelaces as you are walking and then tighten the knots so that they are impossible to undo.

The Glasses Grease Goblin who takes perfectly clean pairs of glasses stored in a case and smears them so badly that you come to wear them you might as well not bother.

Anyone think of others?

Sorry but … er …

2010-02-17T10:12:00.001Z

Occasionally, when my train arrives late at Charing Cross there is an apology given over the tannoy. There is usually some reason given even if it is just the standard “train operating difficulties” which means that the train is broken.

I’ve noticed that for the past few times the announcer gets so far through the message before pausing:

“We’d like to apologise to passengers who have just arrived on platform 6 for the late running of this service. This is due to …”

Then we have the tiniest of pauses. It’s small but noticeable.

“… train operating difficulties.”

“… a trackside fire at Hither Green.”

“… congestion in the London Bridge area.”

“… a passenger being taken ill on an earlier train.”

The pause is probably due to the announcer (and it is a real person, I can tell) rattling off the first part without even thinking and then having to look up the reason for the delay but to us passengers it does sound like he is making it up as he goes along.

Is it me? Part two

2010-01-07T13:05:00.003Z

I went to Sainsbury’s last night for a few bits and bobs. Not a great deal but slightly more than a basketful so I took a trolley.

The store was nearly deserted and there were only two cashiers open. When I went to pay for my shopping I saw one was quite busy so I went to the other one only to be told by the cashier that it was for baskets only.

That’s fine. I understand the need to have basket only tills but what I didn’t like was the way she told me. She had a look on her face that was both derisory and insulted, the look I would have expected had I wandered around the shop completely naked because I was obviously too stupid to dress myself.

What I realised while I queued at the other checkout was that I couldn’t see that the checkout was for baskets. The “baskets only” sign was obscured by some rather large and garish signs hanging from the ceiling advertising the stores latest bargain promotion. I couldn’t possibly have known the checkout was for baskets only unless I was approaching it from the right angle, which I wasn’t, or I had remembered that that till had always been for baskets only. I shop at about eight different supermarkets. I am not in the habit of memorising the checkout configurations of each one.

I should have complained about this but didn’t. There weren’t any obvious managers around and I doubt if the sulky girl on the till would have given a toss anyway.

Is it me? Part one

2010-01-07T13:05:00.001Z

The train home yesterday was packed owing to Southeastern’s policy of running an unnecessarily reduced service just so they don’t have to pay compensation for a normal service that isn’t running properly. I’d taken an early train as well due to their habit of closing Charing Cross at the fall of a snowflake.

Part of the way through the journey I began to feel some snow on the back of my neck and the odd flake or two floating down in front of my face. Someone had opened the window behind me and the blizzard outside was blowing in through the window.

Without thinking I reached up and slammed the window shut only to have the woman sitting opposite me give me a very patronising speech about how some of the people standing up were finding it hot. She wasn’t getting snow in her face at that point.

The window was re-opened and I muttered “fine” and left the window alone for the rest of the journey but glowered every time I felt snow on the back of my head.

I don’t really believe it was that hot in the train. Yes, there were a lot of people and they were dressed for cold weather but the heating wasn’t overpowering.

Some people have to open the windows when they get on the train regardless of whether it is hot or not. It is a habitual, almost OCD, action and they get very panicky if they can’t open the window. On almost all occasions when they open the window they always sit upwind of the window. In other words they like the air but they don’t like the cold breeze, or the rain or the snow.

I do like a it of ventilation myself, now and then. The heating on those trains is never perfect and sometimes it is way too hot. However, on those occasions when I do open the window I try to make sure that it isn’t going make another passenger uncomfortable.

Cost of nostalgia

2010-01-06T12:52:00.001Z

I had a bit of a tidy up in my loft recently and discovered a few old vinyl singles and albums that I had completely forgotten. Feeling nostalgic by these discoveries, and lacking a turntable, I ordered a few CDs off Amazon:

Best of Blancmange
Drowning in Berlin: Best of Mobiles
The Circle and the Square by Red Box
The Platinum Collection by Mari Wilson

I soon received an email from Amazon telling me that the Mari Wilson was out of stock and would be removed from the order. This was a blessing in disguise as the CD cost nearly £30! None of the others were more than £8.

I tried a few other places for the album and for the albums where most of the tracks were originally features but made little progress. They were either out of stock or cost an arm and a leg.

Why on earth is Mari Wilson so expensive and difficult to find? I know the CDs are probably expensive because they are difficult to find but very few 80s artists are available at such a high price.

In the end I downloaded the tracks I wanted individually from Amazon for substantially less (a total of £3.65, in fact) and put them on my iPod. No shiny CD but at least I have the music (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps, Cry Me a River, Just What I Always Wanted and a couple of others that were less well-known)

Of the other three, the usual 80s malady of one or two good tracks amid a sea of dross was firmly evident with the Blancmange and Mobiles CDs with only their one-hit-wonder tracks standing out as any good – Living on the Ceiling (Blancmange) and Drowning in Berlin (Mobiles).

Red Box’s Circle and the Square is remarkably enjoyable, putting a smile on my face during yesterday’s train journey and forcing me to put my laptop away. It has dated a bit with many of the concerns of the day making themselves known on several of the tracks, provoking my 21st Century cynicism but the songs rattle along in a very jolly manner without the wash of self-indulgent claptrap prevalent in many contemporary albums.

For that alone, it was well-worth that trip into the loft.

2010?

2010-01-05T10:29:00.001Z

There are two issues with the year now being 2010. The first, and easiest, is – how do we say it? Is it two-thousand and ten or twenty-ten?

I’ve noticed that I tend to go by the latter, without thinking. It falls more easily off the tongue in the same way that twenty-oh-nine didn’t. A lot of other people do the same. Strange that we do that, isn’t it?

The second issue is writing it. There is always the problem of when the year changes that, again, without thinking, we continue writing the wrong year. Or rather we start to write the wrong year but usually manage to catch ourselves while we’re in the middle of the decade digit. Last year, for instance, when writing the date I would start writing “08” but would realise it should be “09” before I’d finished the “0”.

Now, of course, the decade digit has changed as well so realising that it should be “10” when I’ve started on an “0” is too late. So, for a while, I’ve taken to writing the whole thing just until the idea that we are in the 2010s has settled down in my subconscious.

Brains. Habits. Anyone got a manual?

New Year’s Resolutions 2010

2010-01-01T10:21:00.001Z

As last night’s light dusting of snow prepares to melt on the first day of 2010, it is time for me to blog my resolutions for the year ahead in what has become a tradition over the past few years.

As part of the tradition, let’s first look at last year’s resolutions and see if I had any success. In 2008, I resolved to …

Lose weight
Stop the grow/trim/shave cycle with my beard
Finish my novel
Spend less

2009 was pretty much more of the same. Did I succeed this time?

Weight loss. Yes and no. I have rejoined the gym and I did lose a bit of weight. I have probably regained the weight in this Christmas week alone. My blood pressure scare in 2009 has made me more determined, however, to press on with this and I aim to eat more sensibly.
Beard. Well, no. I’m still growing and trimming and shaving my beard like there’s no tomorrow. I think I just have to conclude that I am indecisive. I will have a longer beard in the winter (as I have now). I will trim it occasionally when I get annoyed with a bit that is patchy or grey. I will cut it down to a goatee when I think faffing around with the trimmers is too much bother. I will accidentally trim too much and end up shaving the thing off. And then, when I get cheesed off with shaving I will grow it back again. Such is life.
Novel. I was going to resolve this year to give myself one more chance to write the novel and to give up with it and never write again if I fall by he wayside but I can’t do that. However much or little I write or however successful I am or am not at it, I have to face up to the fact that I am a writer. It forms my way of looking at the world. I can’t watch a TV show or read a book without unconsciously breaking down the plot and extrapolating where it is going. I just need to apply that skill to my own novel. I have been working at the novel in 2009, trying to reshape that elusive chapter one into a form that grabs the reader by the collar and drags them into the world that I have created. I’m nearly there, I think.
Spend less. Aha! I have had a degree of success with this one out of necessity. As well as having a little less money coming in, I have also had the spectre of Graham moving out to cater for. He hasn’t actually moved out yet but I have had to make sure that I can afford to not have his rent money to count on. I have cut down my spending a great deal to the point where I was actually able to save some money last year by more than the amount I get in rent. Part of the success has been in learning to say no both to myself and to people wanting to help me spend money. I have also shuffled things around in my accounts – consolidated loans and moved my mortgage to somewhere cheaper. I intend to keep up with this now that the silly season of Christmas is out of the way.

Additionally, I want to do a few other things …

Use the internet less. I spend way too much time with my face in my laptop looking at utter rubbish. This needs to stop. Well, it needs to be reduced. There are better things I can be doing with my time – see above under Novel.
Drink less tea. This is an odd one, I know, but I do drink a lot of tea. OK – it is very weak tea and probably contains less caffeine than a bar of soap but I seem to spend half my time at work either in the kitchen or in the loo and then wonder why I can’t sleep at night.
Try to get less angry. A lot of things set me off and I need to try to not let them, especially if I can’t do anything about them. If I can change something then I should do that and not get angry about it first. It rarely helps.
Related to that is to speak when necessary. Often I don’t, preferring to avoid confrontation or not expose myself to ridicule. However, things sometimes need to be said and, if they do, I should say them.
Clear out the rubbish I have accumulated in my house. There’s tons of shit I don’t need in my house that can either go to the tip or on eBay. I need the space and if there is any money to be had then that’s a bonus.
Decorate my house. This has to happen after the rubbish clearing and when Graham has moved out. I need space to decorate.

Well, that’s about enough. I could add that I want to invent time travel, fly to the moon and cure all known diseases but there are only 12 months in 2010 and I don’t want to exert myself.

Jill Sobule is coming to town

2009-12-30T12:40:00.001Z

My favourite singer (after David, of course), Jill Sobule, is doing a UK tour in 2010. The dates and places are:

2/3/2010 (Tue) London Troubadour
3/3/2010 (Wed) Cambridge Junction 2
9/3/10 (Tue) Henley The Crooked Billet
10/3/10 (Wed) Leicester The Musician
11/3/10 (Thu) Bristol St Bonaventure's
14/3/10 (Sun) Milton Keynes The Stables

For more details go to http://www.jillsobule.com/shows

I have booked two tickets for the London show. It isn’t David’s thing so I will have to get someone else to come with me. If there are any of my friends who fancy coming along, please get in touch!

I have blogged about Jill before, several times and so I will try to be restrained here and not be gushy, ration the amount of exclamation marks I use and most definitely not use OMG anywhere. I am, however, pretty excited by this. This is evident by the fact that I have bought tickets and fully intend to go – I never go to concerts other than classical ones. Really, I have never been to a non-classical music concert. I have led a sheltered life.

I really love Jill’s music, however, and would regret not going to see her when I have the chance. She has an absolutely incredible voice and creates wonderfully emotional songs.

Six things

2009-12-09T09:20:00.001Z

There is a meme doing the rounds of bloggers where you are supposed to write six things about yourself that people will not know. My friend Nigel mentioned it in his blog.

What a great idea! I thought. But, hang on a minute, I added, there is very little that people do not know about me as I tend to discuss my innermost feelings with all and sundry like a member of the Chattering Order of St Beryl. This entire blog is a list of my secrets and it’s a lot longer than six items long.

Anyway, let’s see if I can get to six …

I hate marzipan. It is the most disgusting, vile-tasting, horridly textured gloop you can ever imagine. Why anyone would like it is beyond me. And don’t get me started on processed cherries or beer. I have tried beer a couple of times in my life but never really developed a taste for it. I know I could keep trying and then get to like it but I really don’t see why I should. Wine and cider appeal more to my sweet tooth.
I waited until I was in my thirties before deciding that I needed to tell people I was gay. With few exceptions they all knew anyway. That probably isn’t something that isn’t known about me. What really isn’t known is that I liked it when people were surprised. The best was when a former boss actually jumped when I told him.
Werewolf movies give me the willies although I am fine with vampire pictures. If I see a werewolf movie, I have trouble sleeping because I think I hear them coming up the stairs. I am aware of the potential for psychoanalysis and that werewolves can represent our baser animal sides while vampires are more urbane and suave. Just put your notebook away, Dr Freud.
I secretly wish I had ambition. No, it’s true. I was always jealous of colleagues at work and fellow students at school and university who knew what they wanted to do with their lives and had a Plan and were going to stick with it. I never really knew what I wanted to do.
I did have ambitions when I was a kid but they were a bit stupid. I wanted to be an astronaut, for instance, or I wanted to marry the Queen. Probably both were shortcuts to fame and glory resulting in frequent appearances on television. Anyway, the Queen is already married (and really isn’t my type anyway), I feel ill when I go over a humped bridge so space-travel is out of the picture and I get tongue-tied talking with 6 people so goodness knows what would happen if I managed to get on TV.
I have inherited only enough of my father’s dexterity with brushes, hammers and other manly power tools to know that I am no good at DIY.

Haircut

2009-11-27T13:43:00.001Z

Ever since the Psychic Barber went back to Cypress, I have been a bit stuck for someone to cut my hair. He was great and would trim my beard exactly the way I wanted it without me having to tell him and not cost too much either. The barbers I have tried out since have been okay but none have come close. They’ve either been cheap and quick or good but expensive.

It’s amazing how the price of a haircut can range from £7 at Mr Topper’s to £30 or £40 somewhere else.

Today, I decided to have a trim. Following a very cold day a few weeks ago I decided to regrow my beard and, at the same time, allow my hair to grow out of the summer no.1 crop (or shorter) I had been keeping to. For the past few days both have been looking a bit “tufty”, for want of a better word, and it was time to have them tidied up.

I found a nearby barber on Yell.com and popped in. It was a nice experience; he actually used scissors! Can you believe that? I thought I would never see scissors used on my hair ever again. He trimmed my beard neatly and tapered it at the bottom without defining a line and took great care with the stray hairs that had grown a lot longer than their fellows. He washed my hair as well.

£34.

A little more than I was expecting. Certainly more than Mr Topper’s and the Psychic Barber but it was good. I probably will go back. Just not very often.

BBC Headline: Banks 'should disclose number of workers earning £1m'

2009-11-26T09:53:00.001Z

That should be a very short list. Very few people actually earn that much money.

A list that detailed the people that were paid £1m or over would be a lot longer.

Trains, bags and smells

2009-11-25T21:02:00.001Z

I know full well that I have blogged about all of these subjects before. I will undoubtedly blog about them in the future. You will just have to live with it.

This morning’s train was short by a couple of carriages so there was a bit of overcrowding by the time we got to Elmstead Woods. Instead of people just standing near the doors they were standing everywhere, including in the aisles. What annoyed me about this was that the woman who chose to stand next to me had a handbag that was poking me in the shoulder for the entire journey. She didn’t notice, of course, because she was very busy talking with her friend.

We got to Charing Cross a little late so I took the tube but I had to get on hurriedly and found myself crunched up against some woman who was wearing the rankest, strongest perfume I have ever smelt and I knew I would be sneezing (or suffocating) if I breathed it for too long. I was trying to work out if I would be able to hold my breath until we reached the next station or if it would be possible to discretely put my nose inside my coat when I noticed there was a bit of a breeze so I was able to orientate myself so that my nose was in the draft and I wasn’t able to smell her. At the next stop, however, I jumped off the train and ran up the train a few doors.

Didn’t she have a sense of smell?

Under Pressure

2009-11-19T20:50:00.001Z

A few weeks ago, concerned about the weight I have been piling on since I left the gym all those months ago, I went to my GP’s surgery to have my blood pressure tested by the nurse. I have been keeping half an eye on it myself with a little monitor thing I bought from Boots but I wanted it checked by a professional and to anything needed to be done about it.

She ended up using the manual method known variously as sss-sss or jumpy spider (http://www.auntiemomo.com/cakeordeath/unrepeatabletranscript.html - scroll down to Cats and Dogs). Basically she pumped up the cuff by hand and listened to my pulse in a stethoscope. I’m not sure that was accurate as, while the systolic reading (the bigger of the two) was about what I was getting on my home kit (150), the diastolic reading was way off at 100 instead of 90-ish. Anyhow, I have to go back in a month to see if it has decreased.

In the meantime, I have improved my eating habits (fruit for breakfast, salads for lunch and, the worst one, no salt on anything) and returned to the gym. I went three times last week and four this week so far.

I have a week or so to go before I go back to the nurse but I think something is working. My home BP readings have reduced a bit AND I think I have lost about half a stone in weight. That’s about 8 pounds for any American readers and three and a half kilos for anyone who’s feeling a bit metric.

I can also comfortably get into jeans that previously were on the tight side and had my stomach hanging over the top in a rather unattractive way.

I don’t know why I have been able to make progress with my diet and exercise regime this time when I haven’t at others. Not without help anyway. Perhaps knowing that there is a measurable detriment to my health is spurring me on and knowing that it is starting to produce an improvement is also helping.

Silly question

2009-11-04T14:32:00.001Z

I just asked someone who is going on holiday in a few days the cliché question of “going anywhere nice?”

If you think about this, it is a bloody silly question.

You are going on holiday – why choose to go somewhere horrible? Even if it is not the most scenic of places or the hottest or the most interesting. It’s somewhere you have chosen to spend time and money getting to – it is somewhere you want to be.

Working gentleman

2009-11-03T20:30:00.001Z

I have, for the second time in my life, just been asked if I am a “working gentleman”. Why do I find this such a strange phrase?

The first time, many years ago, it was asked of me by a prospective cleaner so that she knew whether I was at home all day or if I was at work. Bit irrelevant really as I wouldn’t be needing a cleaner if I was at home.

This time I was asked by a receptionist at my doctor’s surgery as I was asking about Saturday appointments – something that has recently been introduced at my local surgery for “people who are working”. Fair enough, I suppose. People who can be seen at other times should be seen at other times.

I just find working gentleman an odd way of asking whether I work full time and would prefer a different phrase. I don’t know what but something that didn’t make me sound like an elderly rent boy would be a start.

Homophobia

2009-10-15T13:53:00.001+01:00

Last night, there was a story in the free newspapers of a man who had had such a severe beating in Trafalgar Square a few weeks ago that he recently died. His attackers consisted of two blonde girls and a black man. Before the trio attacked the man they had shouted homophobic insults at him.

In short, two girls helped beat a man to death because he was gay.

Several months ago, another gay man was stabbed to death on his own doorstep in Bromley and his partner placed in intensive care. This attack has been attributed to homophobia as well.

My immediate reaction when hearing these stories is, strangely, to wonder why someone would do that. Why attack someone? Why kill someone purely because of his sexuality?

I can almost understand it if the attacks were made by straight men who had been propositioned by nasty predatory gay men.

Almost.

However, I really cannot understand why two women would do this. What possible reason could there be?

The usual tribal reason given in these circumstances is “because he was different.”

This is the reason that people tender for violence against someone who supports another football team or has skin that is a different colour or who speaks another language or who belong to another religion or are old or … any one of a million differences. Apparently this is enough reason to hurt or even kill someone else.

It’s a pity no-one uses it as a reason for attacking someone who actually thinks those sort of things actually matter.

Over my shoulder

2009-10-15T09:15:00.001+01:00

This morning I had planned to blog about a homophobic murder* so I sat on one of the few seats on the train that give me enough room to use my laptop. They are fold-up seats near the rear driver’s cab that are intended for people with wheelchairs or bicycles and are a bit more widely spaced than normal seats. They are perfect for someone of my height and build, especially when I want to use my laptop.

I had hardly got the laptop turned on before someone got on and sat in the same bank of seats but one further along. That normally would have been fine but he sat turned to one side and was facing me, or more importantly, facing my laptop.

I tried to carry on with the blog but I had to give up. I can’t blog with an audience.

* this will follow later

Today’s crap calendar message

2009-10-09T09:32:00.001+01:00

My page-a-day calendar on my desk is, as I have mentioned before, crap. Today, as it is Friday, the calendar has dispensed this piece of advice:

if you hang up clothes taken out of the dryer when they are slightly damp you reduce the need for ironing and save energy

What? If it’s possible for you to hang the clothes up in the first place, why use a tumble drier at all? OK, it takes longer in the winter months to dry your clothes.

If it isn’t possible for you to hang up your clothes this advice is bloody stupid anyway.

I expect next Friday to see:

if you get your chauffeur to park near to the exit of the car park then you’ll save fuel

Robert Williams is unwell

2009-10-05T23:06:00.001+01:00

I am currently suffering from my first proper cold of the year. It is not swine flu or, I doubt, any other type of flu. I am still able to get up (although I don’t want to) and I am not wracked with pain.

My head, however, does feel it’s too small and occasionally too hot and during the night I had apparently swapped my normal sized bladder for one belonging to an ant. My nose alternates between normality, dripping like a tap and exploding. My lungs are similar and cycle between quiet, rasping and loud hacking cough.

Oddly, when I was a kid, I used to enjoy being ill. I would get to stay in bed and my Mum made a fuss and gave me Lucozade. My Dad would have to carry the television up the stairs for me. We only had the one and in those days they were huge, ungainly and extremely heavy. Only posh kids had televisions in their own bedrooms.

Now, if I have to stay in bed, I can read, surf the web or watch a DVD on my laptop but despite all this choice, I am bored out of my brain. I’m not sure if I will be well enough to go to work tomorrow either.

And I have no Lucozade.

I have dark chocolate Mars bars but that’s another story.

Season ticket

2009-09-25T10:33:00.001+01:00

It’s coming up to the time of year (November) when I buy my annual Travelcard for travel from my home in Orpington (zone 6) to work Tottenham Court Road (zone 1) including tube and bus fares. Last year it was £1740.

I have just checked on the price for this year’s ticket. It is …

£1904!

I really can’t afford this much in one go. It does save me money compared to a monthly or weekly ticket but I’m beginning to suspect that the amount I save would be swallowed up in the interest charges on the credit card.

I will have to change to monthly tickets! Thank goodness I can do it all online these days.

Camera fault

2009-09-23T21:16:00.001+01:00

My camera is a Canon EOS 350D and has an autofocus system that is based on a diamond pattern of seven sensor points that are visible in the viewfinder as seven red dots.

For the last few months I have been having a problem with the camera. I have only been able to use autofocus on the left-most focusing point when I have been using the manual exposure settings. Autofocus worked fine in any other mode but not manual. I looked through the manual that came with the camera and searched all the way through the menu settings to see if there was something that needed adjusting but found nothing. So I reluctantly concluded that the camera had developed a fault and needed to be repaired.

To be absolutely honest, it hasn’t been that much of a problem; I have been experimenting with focusing on that point and then moving the camera with varying degrees of success. I’ve also resorted to using the automatic modes but all summer long I have known that I needed to take the camera to be fixed, probably at great cost, once my main photography season was over.

I decided that today was the day and brought the camera to work with me so that I could drop it in at one of the many shops nearby. By chance, I happened to mention the problem to one of my colleagues (who also has a 350D) and he mentioned a button that I never used which he accidentally nudges from time to time causing him a similar problem.

Of course, that was it and I managed to sort my camera out without having a costly repair. My camera now focuses as it should.

Now that the embarrassing confession is out of the way, I’d better describe the technical solution so that anyone like me who was searching the net for this has something to see …

There is a button at the back top right of the camera. With the camera turned on and ready to take pictures (i.e. NOT displaying them), the button will make the information LCD display the current focus pattern. Pressing the left or right arrow buttons cycles through the focus modes, i.e. far left, middle left, middle, right, far right and then everything. Selecting everything means the camera will choose the best focus pattern at the time whilst the others mean that the camera will only ever focus on that point.

I wish I’d known that a few months ago.

What’s that?

2009-09-07T09:12:00.001+01:00

I am 45 years old but I still find it strange to be in my house alone at night such as last night the first I have spent at home since Graham and Debra went on holiday.

It is amazing just how many odd noises you can hear when the lights are off and you are trying to get to sleep. And it is equally amazing how loud the boiler can sound.

The Time Traveler’s Wife – a non-review

2009-09-05T14:32:00.001+01:00

I have read and seen a great many time travel stories. Most of them have made me groan or leap into the air shouting “NO!” because of some horrible logical inconsistency.

The Back to the Future trilogy has a few, the worst being that the girlfriend is left sleeping on a porch in a dystopian “present” and is still sleeping on the same porch after the past has been changed and the present restored to normal.

Star Trek, in all its incarnations, has too many to count, its writers using time travel as a big red reset button way too often.

And don’t talk to me about Superman flying backwards very fast!

It was a relief, therefore, to read The Time Traveler’s Wife and find a well crafted time travel romance that hung together extremely well. I could find no logical problems with Henry’s trips through time. The film, I am glad to say, was as consistent and told a lovely story that was funny in places and horribly sad in others.

The only criticism I would have with the movie was the horrible wig Eric Bana had to wear to distinguish young Henry from his older self. It kept drawing my attention as I watched the film.

Everything else, from the casting Henry and Claire’s daughter to the wonderfully handled wedding scene was perfect.

I knew before I saw the movie, however, that it was a film that few people would find wholly satisfying. It is a romance and it is a time travel story. I am a romantic science fiction fan. I enjoy romances and time travel stories (if they are done well) so a movie that features both is a winner for me.

Sadly, I think I am in a fairly small minority, however.

Weird dream

2009-09-01T13:58:00.001+01:00

I dreamt that David’s choir had been given new uniforms for their next concert rather than the black shirts and trousers that they have to buy themselves

The problem was that the new outfit was a cross between a cheerleader’s uniform and the Blue Power Ranger.

Dream-me thought that was very funny.

Logging

2009-08-28T09:37:00.001+01:00

One of my birthday presents was a book about the Titanic, which some of you may know is one of my obsessions. For those of you who are interested, the book (The Sinking of the Titanic: The Mystery Solved by LM Collins) is written by someone familiar with sailing in ice infested waters and calls into question some of the accepted facts of the Titanic’s story. It is worth reading although it can be a bit dry and it definitely isn’t one of the many conspiracy theories currently on the market.

This post isn’t about the Titanic, however. I’m only going to make a small observation about the migration of words and how it happens in only a short time. It has been less than 100 years since the Titanic sank but in that time the word “log” has changed in its meaning quite significantly.

One of the testimonies of the survivors mentioned the ship’s log, which I thought meant, as probably did you, something like a large diary detailing significant events on the ship. We use the word now to mean exactly that. This blog, or webLOG, is little more than an electronic diary on the web.

The log referred to by the Titanic survivor is actually a device for measuring the speed of the ship through water. Not the record of the speed but the way in which it was measured.

Isn’t that amazing? In 98 years the meaning of a word has transferred from a device to the recordings of the device to a general record of any sort. Captain’s log, weblog, logbook, error log.

I vaguely remember that the reason the device is known as a log is because it actually used to be a real log – a bit of a tree – that was trailed behind a sailing vessel and used in some way to measure the speed of a ship.

Imagine that!

Buxton G&S Festival 2009

2009-08-26T13:11:00.003+01:00

I have just spent a week at the 16th International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton. I loved it.

I won’t review the shows here. I saw too many and have left too long a gap since I saw them before writing this to do any of them justice. I will mention one or two in passing among my general impressions of the week. Besides other people have written some excellent reviews that can be found easily on the web. Just look.

Another note before I dive into this … although I have seen quite a few G&S productions in the last decade, I still consider myself very much a G&S neophyte. I can’t sing and I believe I am almost musically dyslexic, which combined with my almost paralysing self-consciousness in front of any crowds larger than six people means that I could never take part in any amateur G&S production. I content myself with watching the shows and enjoying them but that’s about it. As a consequence, I don’t know the shows in as much detail as many of the fans. Most of them appear to have taken part in at least one G&S show in their lifetime and therefore know everything.

Anyway, back to the festival …

The shows were consistently excellent with every cast demonstrating energy, talent and, very importantly for me, excellent diction. Being able to hear the words makes a huge difference and turns a confusing mass of music and costumes into a real story.

My favourites during the week have to include the Opera della Luna productions of The Sorcerer and Parson’s Pirates and, of course, this year’s show from Festival Productions Ireland, The Gondoliers.

Festival Productions are always outstanding and have won awards galore in Buxton ever since they first took part in the festival three years ago with their version of The Mikado. This year was no different and Gondoliers was to the same very high standard with an exceedingly enthusiastic chorus and marvellous principals. It was another multiple award winning performance.

Parson’s Pirates is not, strictly speaking, G&S. It is essentially a play about the casting session for a production of Pirates of Penzance in the first half and a truncated Pirates in the second half. Like all Luna productions, however, it has a very small cast with lots of doubling of roles, giving ample opportunity for humour. It also has a non-existent fourth wall with the audience apparently attending as if they were auditioning for the production’s chorus. We had to sing along with the Mikado song “Tit willow” – half the audience had to sing “willow” and the other half “tit” prompted by some very dubious looking characters. There is something delightfully silly about having to repeatedly shout “tit!” in an opera house.

The Sorcerer brings me to the subject of the fans. I have previously mentioned how G&S fans are very similar to science fiction fans. I am one of the tiny minority of people who have been to SF conventions and the G&S festival and I can tell you that there is very little difference between the core fan groups.

The demographic of the average G&S fan is, however, a little bit older and much more conservative with a tendency towards scandalised conversations at breakfast. The hardcore older fan knows what he or she likes and it isn’t change.

Last year there was a production of Ruddigore that transferred the action to a village cricket match. I have seen a few versions of Ruddigore and thought that this one was very innovative, funny and rather well done. You should, however, have heard the gasps of horror at the hotel the following morning. It had not been done the Traditional Way, the Right Way. All that had changed, however, was the set and some of the words both in the dialogue and some of the songs. I’m not sure how that is wrong, to be honest, as there is a well-established tradition of contemporising some of the songs. The Little List song in The Mikado, for instance, is always “adjusted” to pet hates of the day such as people talking too loudly on their phones or MP’s expenses fiascos.

This year’s Sorcerer provoked a similar reaction. It was set in the 1960s rather than the nineteenth century. The set, the costumes and some of the dialogue had changed to reflect the times but not very much. There were two other changes which I will have to explain after describing some of the normal plot.

The regular version of Sorcerer concerns the desire of a couple deeply in love to have their entire village share in their joy. To this end they enlist the help of a local sorcerer, John Wellington Wells, to provide them with a love philtre which they administer to the village in cups of tea. At this point the entire village falls asleep, the curtain falls and we shun the overpriced ice cream in the foyer.

Act two opens with the villagers waking and they fall in love with the first person they see who has also drunk some of the love potion. There are some very odd pairings but the experience is viewed by the young couple as a huge success – so much so that the young woman wants to take the potion at the same time as her young swain so that they can remain in love forever. He’s not so keen on that but she takes the potion anyway and falls in love with the vicar. The mess is eventually sorted out and people pair up with the ones they are “meant” to be with.

The Luna production had two relatively minor yet radical changes. Oddly only one caused tongues to wag.

The first was that the reaction to the potion caused its victims to be a bit spaced out before they fell asleep. They looked happily drunk to me but the opinion of the blue-rinse fans was negative: “oh – it was all about drugs!” What utter rubbish! One scene with a euphoric reaction to a love potion and apparently the whole village is on heroin. I don’t think so.

The second change was that it was the man who wanted to take the potion to make the couple’s love permanent and it is he who falls in love with the male vicar. Amazingly, I heard no tongues wagging about that. I like to think that it’s because the world has moved on and no-one finds same-sex love that difficult but it’s more likely that the nay-sayers were so scandalised by that they couldn’t even speak about it or that they viewed it so terribly wrong that it didn’t even need articulating. Or maybe they held their tongues about that one when talking to a gay couple.

One final point and it isn’t about the fans or the shows but about manners. During one of the performances a woman and her husband saw fit to chatter all the way through. No amount of shushing or glaring (from myself, David and the man sitting between me and the woman’s husband all at once) stopped them. Nor did the presence of the usherette in the next seat. They just chattered away without a thought.

I gather that we Brits are unusual in our dislike of this sort of thing. Other countries don’t seem to mind people talking (or worse) throughout performances. I don’t think we are wrong in this. If I pay to see a show, then it’s the show I want to see and hear and not some stupid woman with verbal diarrhoea blabbering away as if she were sitting at home watching some mindless sitcom. Also, to my mind, the people on the stage have put in a great deal of effort and it is only fair to give them our full attention.

Georgia Nicolson

2009-08-14T09:29:00.001+01:00

Who is Georgia Nicolson?

Georgia is the heroine in a series of books by Louise Rennison, The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson. I have written about them before on this blog but, in short, Georgia is a teenaged girl suffering all of the usual stuff that girls of that age suffer. Boys, parents, make-up, dubious little sisters and over-seed cats. The usual.

The series is incredibly funny and at times rather touching. Georgia often comes across as a rather arrogant girl who knows it all but, in reality, we know she doesn’t and, more importantly, so does she. She also loves her family dearly, especially her little sister, her ferocious cat, and her parents although she would never admit it. She also has a hidden heart of gold and ends up, almost secretly, doing the right thing.

Rennison has, through Georgia and her supporting characters, a remarkable talent for inventing new words and phrases: poo-parlour division, nippy noodles, basoomas and nunga-nungas to name but a few. There’s the snogging scale and the having a hump scale (no, not that sort of hump, you dirty mixes!).

David buys me the latest book in the series for my birthday each year. As yesterday was my birthday I now have the tenth in the series, ‘Are these my basoomas I see before me?’

Unfortunately, it is also the last.

I am almost reluctant to read the book although I know that when I start I will read it obsessively and finish the thing within a day. Will Rennison end it on a high?

Will Georgia see the light and drop Massimo the luuuurve god, forget about Robbie the sex god and finally realise that she belongs with Dave the Laugh?

Can I borrow your pen?

2009-08-07T09:46:00.001+01:00

Last night on the train home, I was trying as ever to complete the Soduko puzzle in the London Lite. I gave up, put my pen away and fished out my iPod to play a game or two of patience.

Then I noticed the guy across the aisle was trying to get my attention.

“Can I borrow your pen?” he asked. He was clutching a mobile phone and a newspaper. I assumed he needed a pen to write down a phone number or something like that.

“Sure,” I answered and passed it over. It’s not a greatly valuable pen - I bought it as part of a pack of 10 I found in a shop in Kowloon – but I like it. It’s small enough to fit in my trouser pocket without stabbing me when I sit down.

The guy took the pen and then started to work on a WordSearch puzzle in the paper.

I was a bit perturbed by this. Should I say something at this blatant cheek?

I did the British thing and kept quiet although I did leave one of my headphones out of my ear. Quite what good that would do, I don’t know. Perhaps I was worried he would start eating my pen or make a quick get-away at the next station.

All was resolved when he found the WordSearch as difficult as my Soduko and gave my pen back a few minutes later.

Result

2009-08-02T23:34:00.001+01:00

At the end of April I made a complaint to ING Direct about not being able to close an account. I wrote a letter of complaint that sounds frothing-at-the-mouth mad as I read it now but it got the facts across. I perhaps shouldn’t have used so many capitals but I was excessively angry.

Basically what happened was that I had an account that had a notice period but when I rang to give notice to close the account I was told to call back the next day. I did and I was told that it was all sorted out. A month later the money was still in the account and when I called to ask why I ended up speaking to some patronising woman who told me I should have given notice and that I would have to wait six months for the next exit window before I could get my money out.

So I wrote my letter. I didn’t expect anything to happen. I just wanted to vent my anger. However, every so often I would get a letter back from ING to say that they were looking into my complaint. I thought nothing of that. Form letter, I thought.

Then on Friday, I got another letter from them to say that they thought my complaint was quite just and were closing the account now (two months before the next exit window) and giving me my money and £30.

I just checked the account online and they have done as they said. The money is out of the impossible to touch account and in my regular savings account.

I did say in my complaint that I was going to close the savings account as I was so unhappy with their service but now I’m not so sure.

Matt and Jules’s wedding

2009-07-19T21:04:00.001+01:00

My nephew and his very long term girlfriend got married yesterday. I was there and helped to upload photos from various cameras onto Matt’s laptop so that they could be projected onto a wall of the marquee during the reception.

That was a bit of an experience. Let’s just say I don’t like Vista.

It was great to see various members of the family I hadn’t seen for a while as well as various members of Matt’s dad’s family (including Matt’s dad himself) that I hadn’t seen for even longer, even though one of them told me that I am now the spitting image of my father.

On that last note, I was going to write a whole blog entry about that and how I felt about that and about my father but that turned rather long and directionless and I decided to delete it. Yes, I do look like my father and, yes, I behave like him in a distressingly great number of ways. I have though managed to avoid heterosexuality and fatherhood and alcoholism. I am as pigheaded as he is and I also hate to admit I am ever wrong. Which I am not, of course.

I think I have inherited his early love of photography which he sadly to dropped in later life. He took some stunning shots of my mother – clearly he loved her to bits while my brother and sister were kids and when they were both in their seventies. My tastes run more to landscapes and flowers.

I wish I’d his practical skills but, sadly, only enough to know how to wield a paintbrush and to know which jobs not to tackle. I wouldn’t know how to work on my car and I can’t bang bits of wood together to make anything other than two bits of wood rather than chairs and tables and fitted wardrobes.

Modern day myth

2009-07-17T16:55:00.001+01:00

The BBC are currently touting this on their website as news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8154200.stm

Yet again they are pointing the finger at men and labelling them as lazy, ignorant, macho idiots who don’t bother going to their GP when something is obviously wrong.

This story was “reported” a few months ago and has only resurfaced due to the recent disclosure that the footballer John Hartson has been diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer.

I have every sympathy with Hartson: he is younger than me, has to be a lot fitter and has a wife and young family. It is a tragic case and I wish him well.

I do, however, take exception to the BBC again perpetuating the myth that it is always the man’s fault that things like this are not caught in time. Reading further down the article reveals a comment that perfectly illustrates why I feel this way:

Frankly, if you're a male of working age, doctors also assume there can be little wrong with you. I asked for a general check-up when I reached 40, and as well getting a slightly frosty response, was asked "well, do YOU think there's anything wrong?" It's not embarrassment, it's being made to feel you're wasting the time of NHS staff.

I have had to make two or three trips to see one of the GPs at my surgery before I am taken seriously and have some action taken. One of my friends has had the same experience at a different surgery.

Undoubtedly there are men who do not go to the doctor because it’s not something “blokes” do but those that make the effort often feel that their GP considers them a waste of time. If you get that feeling often enough you begin to think that a visit to the GP is in itself a waste of time.

The Swine

2009-07-16T15:19:00.001+01:00

One of my colleagues, a woman who has a reputation for staying off sick for the slightest reason, has today come into the office with all the apparent symptoms of Swine Flu.

She refuses to go home, citing lots of work that needs to be done and claiming that most people on her floor are already ill.

We think another colleague of mine has it as well but she, a rather more sensible and sensitive woman than our inconsiderate friend, has stayed home.

It is probably only a matter of time before we all get it although probably a lot less as of today.

Achievement

2009-07-06T09:51:00.001+01:00

I had a real sense of achievement over the weekend. I felt like I had really done something worthwhile. Something good.

What had I done? Had I sorted out my debts?

No.

Had I worked on my novel?

No.

Had I taken the most fantastic picture ever?

As if.

Did I finally paint my bathroom ceiling?

Yes, and it looks very nice, thank you very much for asking.

And did I clear my entire backlog of ironing?

Yes! Hahaha.

Now, when exactly did I turn into my parents?

Late Eurovision blogging

2009-07-03T10:39:00.001+01:00

Regular readers will know that my feelings towards Eurovision have gone from hate to disinterest to interest and finally to full-blown fanaticism in the space of a few years.

I have seen it every year since 2003, the year David and I began to see each other, and have nearly all the albums. Last year and this year I actually bought the CDs before the contest so that I would be more engaged on the night.

I was missing the album for 2005 but I recently bought it from someone on eBay. Normally I can listen to these things and find one or two songs that I actually like enough to add to my favourites playlist on my iPod. This year, 2009, contributed quite a few to my favourites playlist as have 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008. They are still there and still enjoyed.

2005, however, now that I have listened to it, doesn’t seem to have any that I like that much. There are no tracks that catch my ear. There’s lots of bland poppy ballads and tons of clones of 2004’s entry for Turkey (including the year’s UK entry) although Turkey’s 2005 song dares to be different.

I don’t remember 2005 being that bad but it does put me off trying to track down 2003 a bit.

Facebook friend suggestions

2009-07-02T13:17:00.001+01:00

Facebook has had a habit recently of suggesting people I used to know. I find this amazing because none of these people should have links to anyone I know and Facebook has never, to my knowledge, had access to any of my email address books.

It still suggests people I don’t know from Adam, of course, but at times it gets it right surprisingly well.

Accident

2009-07-01T12:52:00.001+01:00

A couple of years ago, the A21 between Bromley Common and Bromley itself was rearranged slightly to make it easier to turn right into Magpie Hall Lane. The road was widened so that there were two lanes (one for through traffic and the other for the right-hand turn) and a traffic island put in place between the on-going lane and the turn-off. It is sort-of L-shaped to prevent cars from the other direction getting in the wrong lane.

You can see what it looks like here: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?sourceid=navclient&rlz=1T4GFRC_enGB212GB212&q=map+%22bromley+common%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=uk&ei=lyxLSryMOJO8jAfHh6xm&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1

Last night, when I was driving to Bromley to see David, there was a stream of traffic ahead of me which included a Police van so everyone was keeping to the speed limit. A white van somewhere ahead of the Police van was trying to turn right into Magpie Hall Lane and was waiting for a suitable gap in the oncoming traffic.

Nothing out of the ordinary there. I’ve seen all sorts of vehicles turn right there in the past.

Shortly after the Police van passed the junction, the scene became very unusual, because it was then that I noticed a car heading towards me on the wrong side of the van turning right.

The car was between the van and the railings on the island. It should have been on the other side of the van with the regular stream of traffic.

It took me a little while to realise something wasn’t right with this scene and by that time the car ran out of room between the van and the railings and hit both before coming to a stop.

Luckily, the driver of the Police van noticed, turned on the blue flashing lights and immediately turned around.

How did the driver of the car get there? The “L” shape of the island should have prevented the traffic coming away from Bromley getting into that lane. He could have come from Magpie Hall Lane but he did seem to be driving a bit too quickly for someone turning right.

Was he from abroad and forget which side of the road we drive on in the UK? Was he drunk? Was he trying to put some distance between himself and the Police?

Unfortunately, I don’t think I shall ever find out.

Revamped website

2009-06-25T13:50:00.001+01:00

Now that I have accounts on Facebook, Blogger and Flickr, all of which are more or less linked, I have very little need for a website.

When, in the dim and distant past, I first created a website, it was partly to give me some practice in this new and exciting HTML thing that everyone was raving over and partly to show off some photos I had taken. I put in some details about myself and links to things that I found interesting.

Now, years later, any photos I want to show the world, I on to Flickr, and sometimes, but rarely, on Facebook.

Facebook shows the world any information about myself and what I like. At least, it has enough information that I would have been happy to put on my own website.

And here, I put down all sorts of random thoughts that I would have put on the website anyway.

So, I have cut my website down to a single page containing three links. One to Facebook, one to Flickr and the other to here.

Stretch goals

2009-06-25T11:22:00.001+01:00

Today’s Savage Chickens cartoon introduced me to a new term: Stretch Goal.

I looked it up and it is, according to Business Dictionary.Com, a goal that cannot be achieved by incremental or small improvements but require extending oneself to the limit.

This is one of these business type terms that I instantly hate. I hope it never catches on but I suspect it is already gaining ground or there wouldn’t be cartoons about it.

Unsettled

2009-06-25T09:21:00.001+01:00

For the past week or so, I have been waking up at about 4.45am. That’s roughly about when the sun comes up so I assumed that it was the light that was waking me.

So I bought some blackout curtain liners which have cut out a lot of the light. I’m still waking at 4.45 though.

There might be a noise but I’m not sure. It might just be a habit.

Anyway, I woke at 4.45 this morning and sort of drifted in and out of sleep. My alarm went off at 6.15 and I snoozed it. It went off again at 6.23 and I snoozed it, as normal. I must have. Then I appear to have fallen asleep again as the next alarm went off at 6.31 at the same time as the other alarm on the chest of drawers.

Normally, I use the two snoozes to gradually wake up but this morning I was rudely grabbed from a rather unsettling bad dream to wakefulness. Or, as is normal in these situations, a sort of not-quite-wakefulness that leaves me feeling rather unsettled for most of the morning.

Dairy Quest

2009-06-24T12:36:00.001+01:00

I popped out to the local shops yesterday morning to post my nephew’s birthday card. On the way back I saw a Dairy Quest milk float. My mind wasn’t working properly because I read the sign on the front as Hairy Chest.

I’m not sure what that sort of milkman would be selling. Not milk, that’s for certain.

Back to school

2009-06-18T11:58:00.001+01:00

I’ve just had an email from George.com, the online clothing arm of Asda, advertising their new Back to School range. Isn’t this a little early?

There were still kids going to school this morning as I made my way to work. They can’t go back; they haven’t left.

Clothing and stationery retailers should role out the tired old “Back to School” advertising campaigns a little closer to when the kids are actually due back at school and preferably when they are on their break.

Perhaps George should start advertising their Christmas 2010 range now?

See me!

2009-06-16T11:20:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I have a look over my recent blog postings and find that I have written the most awful claptrap in some language that is close to but clearly isn’t English.

It would be useful if there were some blog reviewer who could mark blog posting in much the same way as teachers used to mark my homework.

I wonder how many would be marked D – See me!

Steps of Shame

2009-06-15T14:16:00.001+01:00

I just ordered a second-hand Best of Steps CD. Tell no one, it’s our little secret, OK?

Calendar advice

2009-06-12T10:08:00.001+01:00

My desk calendar is a cheap horrible thing called “Planet Earth”. I was expecting 365 pictures of lovely places and animals but instead I get some nice pictures which are often repeated and every week some sage advice.

Today, it has given me advice …

did you know?

By closing off any unused areas in your house, you can heat or cool your home more efficiently.

Probably this is quite correct but how many people have large enough houses to be able to close off areas that they don’t use?

I’ll let you ponder that for a moment while I pop home and close down the east wing.