Wednesday 20 April 2011

Opposites

As I've pointed out before (see posts Fluctuation, Hurry and Office) I lived for many years in or near London. So It came as a quite a culture shock to finally leave city and suburbia behind and move out to join the country-life.

Town vs. country is an age old debate and one I still don't have a clear answer on. When asked if I miss living in London I tend to say yes as I had a wonderful time there. But would I move back? Probably not. Apart from anything else I'm not sure I could afford to any more. I am lucky in that my Sister's still there so I get to visit the metropolis at least. And now that my kids are growing up we are making day trips to see all the important sites. Life must include a visit to London's museums, galleries and some of the infamous sights and settings. And not forgetting that all important trip to Forbidden Planet. Other comic shops are of course available but FP is like coming home to me. I still reminisce about the days when it was a seedy little place on Denmark Street with more akin to a Soho dirty mag emporium than a comic shop.

Shopping is a big drawback when it comes country living. Our nearest town has very little to offer retail-wise which I find disappointing and frustrating around Christmas time. I know in this modern age I should forget the High Street and look to the internet for my purchases but I would still much prefer to spend an hour or so in a large shop touching the merchandise. But then I'm a tactile sort of guy - just ask my cat. London used to offer me shops with three or four floors of books or rack upon rack of DVDs. Along with with hundreds of small independent shops for the more obscure acquisition.

But then the country does appear to have a much calmer pace to it. Not that I really need it. MW says if I were any more laid back I'd be standing on my head! But this country living does get to you, even if I can't experience it as much as I'd like. I'd love to spend an afternoon sleeping in a deckchair to the soporific sound of cricket on the green or sitting outside a pub watching the bees and mayflies doing their bug-ballet-boogie! Unfortunately I spend most of my weekends shipping the kids from one place to another - music, dance, scouts, parties - their list of extra curricular activities goes on and on. I don't begrudge them the opportunity but it does eat into my 'do nothing' time.

Which leads me to my other bugbear about these green and pleasant parts; transport. When I worked in London I'd use train, bus, tube and even feet to get from place to place. I knew the shortest of short cuts around the West End and would gladly sit for hours commuting on the Central Line each morning. I could get through three novels a week and still find time to write myself. I could also simultaneously ignore every other soul on the train (including the loony with duffel-coat and can of White Lighting, singing the Beatles).

In comparison in the country I have to drive everywhere, which means keeping the car going because if that stops working you're stuffed! There will be a hopper bus going where you want but it'll take half a day to get there. And you could possibly walk but only if you want to risk being run over while traipsing down some country lane. Bikes are great for a day out around a lake or park but again a death-trap with spokes in the getting to work stakes. I don't mind driving but I have no passion or pride for my car. I haven't washed it in about six months and I'm slowly running it into the ground just travelling the fifteen miles to and from work each day. And worst of all I'm on my own - which is in no way the same as being with while at the same time ignoring a crowd of people. True, I can supply the Beatles-belting myself but even out here the drinking while driving bit is frowned on!

But for all my complaints it's a bumpkin's life for me. Maybe it's a case of the Devil you know or possibly it was always there, waiting to come out. MW certainly made a premonition when we came here a decade ago that I'd end up doing something country-ish. She had visions of me all in white, cross garters with a top hat, whacking my hazel on the village green! I told her to pull the other one because it didn't have bells on and so resisted the power of the Morris-side. But instead I finally fell for that other village staple; campanology. Four years in the tower and I've finally the bells to roughly strike Plain Bob Minor!

The chimes of London told Dick Whittington to turn again, but now I laugh at such temptation and answer back in their own tongue,

"You can keep your gold-paved streets! I'm off to the village fete for a slice of cake and an out-sized vegetable!"

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Friday 15 April 2011

Darkness

I am a creature of the night! Not one who craves blood - but cheese!

There is a special time of night reserved for me when everyone else has gone to bed. I'm a night-owl you see, often wide awake in the hours either side of midnight. Even if I should go to bed at a reasonable time I can't get to sleep without inevitably spending hours reading. But what I really want is a visual cheese fix!

I love movies and can see the good stuff at any-time as thankfully my family feel the same. But cheesy cinema is currently something only I enjoy and so is saved for private consumption. I refer mainly to those films once classed as being 'straight-to-video' but also 'cult' stuff. In my student days I would stay up till three or four in the morning watching such films, selected from a whole trunk full of videos, both shop-bought and recorded from TV, and the cheesier the better. So possibly a time-travel-triple of 'Terminator', 'Timescape' and 'Timerider'. Or following on from there, other Fred Ward classics such as 'Tremors' or 'REMO: Unarmed and Dangerous'. Even when living with MW(TG) I liked a little late night cheese and at this time the BBC would often finish their schedule by showing some prime cheddar, with the likes of 'Trancers', 'Deep Red' or 'Dark City'.

Sadly the onset of serious work brought these late night sessions to an end. My trouble was I wouldn't know when to stop! If left in front of a TV I would almost always find something to watch and before I knew it it was early morning with a full day of honest toil just waiting to happen. To make matters worst, when we finally moved over to cable from terrestrial TV about eight years ago it was like entering cheese-heaven!. Suddenly I had a veritable cheese-board of delicacies at my fingertips every night and not just movies. I was watching old TV programmes and classic cartoons into the wee small hours. I even fell into the trap of watching poker on TV (Not playing, mind - watching! A gambling voyeur!)

At about the same time I also gained a perfect excuse for these late night viewings with the arrival of my daughter. She, like myself, was never a big one for sleeping as a baby and even now would rather be up late than up early. When we took her to The Greenman Festival aged five she stayed up till gone midnight to scream and dance to the great Jarvis Cocker! ("Angela! Angela!") As a baby this was a killer for MW because awake all night also meant FEED all night! I would therefore do the 'gallant' thing and take the babe away from the milk bar. We would slip downstairs for a few hours and I'd watch TV, and more often than not my daughter would watch with me.

Obviously I stayed away from anything harmful to such a young and impressionable mind. However, the music channels proved a popular compromise and our late night sessions were filled with a real mix-bag. Her favourites at the time included OutKast's 'Hey Ya!' (no doubt for the fast pace and bright colours) and Kelis' 'Milkshake' (although this may have been a subliminal desire to get back upstairs for a feed!). But her favourite was The Darkness and 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' - which if watched with a small child in mind, could quite easily be an episode of The Wiggles or Teletubbies.

But all good things come to an end and my daughter finally started sleeping through. I sensibly curtailed my late night viewing once more and reverted to marathon book reading again. But in the last year a new channel-to-cheese has presented itself to me with the arrival of the iPod and iPhone. Now, with some downloading or streaming, I can go to bed at a sensible hour, settle down and catch up on films both classic and cheesy, TV programmes old and new. When eyelids finally start to droop I unplug, roll over and embrace the darkness. Late night cheese may give nightmares to some but for me it's a pathway to peace...

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This Blog entry is dedicated to all the Facebook friends and family recently blessed with little joy bundles. In particular Mr and Mrs G and their new son RHG. May your evenings be full of music and magic!

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Friday 8 April 2011

Sport

I'm starting to see a theme emerging in my posts as the random-word-generator keeps leading me to things in life at which I'm rubbish - sport possibly being at the very top of the pile!

Actually I don't feel bad about not taking part in sporting activities - for one thing I'm not particularity competitive. The closest I got to competing was at school sports days. In particular I remember the year I captained the Tug-of-war team for my house and won. Still immensely proud (should probably put it on my CV) and props to the other members of the team that year ("Go Crusaders!")

Of course sports days involve 'sport' in the very loosest meaning of the word due to its lexicon of non-Olympic events. Although can you imagine how great it would be if the 2012 Olympics included the likes of the three-legged race, the wheel barrow race or the hat-scarf-and-bag race. I'd certainly pay to see that...

"and here comes Eugene Bolt making a brilliant show and... Oh no! his bean-bag has fallen off his head so he'll have to go back to the last hoop! What bad luck..."

Of course the cyclical nature of the Universe, coupled with the advent of parenthood, has brought me back to the sports day and it's new connotation - the parent race! At the very first one I attended I waited with anticipation for the call to come for all dads. Now, we all know the stories associated with the parents race, how some take it a little bit too serious, even going so far as to turn up in shorts and running spikes. And given my track record I knew I'd out of the running for a medal, but my son would expect me to at least have a go.

I made my way to the line eyeing up the mix of football, rugby and cricket players lining up with a feeling of last place looming. But that didn't matter. I'd take part and that'd be all. However, once I stood shoulder to shoulder on that starting line it felt different. Also all those eager little faces watching you, each knowing in their hearts that their Dad is the greatest and will fly down the track like roadrunner. Suddenly I felt I had to go for it! The whistle blew and we were off!

Now, some have blamed what happened next on the fact that I was running in jeans that day. And possibly some might generously say that it was foul play but let me tell you the truth. As soon as we started I could feel that I'd pushed myself too far. I was over balanced by about the third stride and couldn't pull myself back. With the screams and cheers of the whole school buzzing in my ears I stumbled and suddenly saw the ground coming up to meet me. I hit the sun baked earth with my left shoulder and did a full 180 degree turn, ending up flat on my back half-way down the track.

Amazingly for me I wasn't embarrassed. Instead I totally saw the funny side and lay there laughing, delusions of speed having finally left me. Of course my poor son was upset but as I later explained even in running spikes, Lycra outfit and with a good tail wind I'd never have been first. So I stood up, bowed to the kids and moved unceremoniously back to were the parents I knew were stationed.

It was only when I got there that I started to realise that I'd banged my shoulder quite hard. Concerned friends said I'd probably pulled a muscle so should keep moving it. I tried but it became increasingly harder to do so and more painful. By the end of the afternoon I was in no doubt that I'd done some serious damage to my shoulder and a visit to the hospital confirmed that I had in fact broken it!

I therefore made school history that day for not only being the first parent to break their collarbone at such an event, but also receiving a lifetime ban from the parent race (courtesy of my wife). That was six years ago and at every sports day since when they're touting for parental-competitors I just smile and point to my shoulder.

"Try Eugene Junior's dad instead. He should put on a good show..."

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Thursday 7 April 2011

Debug

The bees may be disappearing but the wasps are back!

Let me make myself clear - I'm an animal lover and would not knowingly do harm to any living creature. I will go out of my way to help the smallest insect out of my house with a glass and some paper rather than squash the poor thing. I hoovered up an ant in the kitchen the other day by accident and was racked with guilt for hours. But I don't get on well with wasps. It not a fear and nor is it a grudge - I have never been stung by one, as far as I can remember. The only clear sting I do remember was from a bee.

It's a very vivid memory, as they always are. I would have been about five years old and standing in our garage. In those days my father never put the car away but left it on the drive. It was company owned so I suppose that meant he felt less pride through lack of true ownership. The garage was therefore a place of storage. It was a sunny day and my father was searching the bench which ran along the back wall for something or other and I was stood in the centre on the garage looking out past the car at the street beyond. My attention was attracted by a small black dot ziggerty-zagging around and had barely registered it as a bee when it flew straight into the garage, landed on my arm an stung me. Now I swear that this was totally unprovoked. The memory ends there but would no doubt have resulted in tears, quickly followed by a smothering in TCP or Savlon.

So apart from that one bee-astard I get on fairly well with bees. Wasps - well it hard to find anyone who likes a wasp. There have been various run-ins (or rather run-aways) with them over the years. But the biggest event was a few years ago when one summer we started finding them in our house more and more. Now, as I said, this was summer and a wasp loves an open window but statistically there was just too many of them bimbling around the place. In particular they were appearing in the upstairs bathroom which seemed to have grown a new one every morning!

Wondering if they were finding some way in I searched the room and slowly became away of a distant buzzing coming from above my head. The hatch to our attic was in the bathroom so climbing a ladder I pushed the hatch open and was immediately face to face with a wasp. Expecting the worst I waited until after dark (wasps do sleep I guessed) and I entered the attic. Sure enough there I found a wasps' nest in the eves of the roof. Now a wasps' nest can be a beautiful thing - I've seen several large globes of wood-pulp and wasp-spit in museums and indeed an old one in my sisters attic - but this was just shoddy. The wasps had basically rammed their splinter-sputum into a gag between two beams with no feeling of ownership (maybe it too was company owned). It was in fact the DIY Disaster of the insect world.

On returning to the world below, and checking I hadn't brought anything else back with me, I proceeded to contact the local council expecting them to be round in seconds with smoke grenades and a SWAT team ( in this case a team a people each with a swatter). But instead It was explained to me that wasps are no longer destroyed out of turn.

"What? Do they get a fair trial first?"

It transpires that wasps are in fact our friends (who knew?) Or at least the friend to the gardener as they will keep down the numbers of green-fly and other such pests. It was also explained that this would only be for the duration of the summer. When wasps reach that drunken, lairy stage of staggering around and slowly dying like a bad Shakespearian actor, the queen will go into hibernation deep within the nest. She will then re-emerge the next spring and head for a new location, there to start another home.

This of course was cold comfort to us who had to suffer a summer with a wasp in the bathroom each morning and particularly for myself being the only one who was ever sent up the attic to retrieve anything. Any such trip resulted in the need to cover myself head to toe in thick clothing and arm myself to the teeth. I'd then spend however long I was up there swatting away like Luke Skywalker with the practice drone in Star Wars, until I'd found whatever it was. Autumn duly arrived and the attic stopped buzzing. The next spring we think we witnessed the queen's abdication when a wasp the size of a gerbil appeared in my sons bedroom one morning. My trusty glass and paper saw her on her merry way and indeed the nest remained empty (not surprising given the look of the thing!)

We have since left the house in question and are presently hibernating ourselves at a temporary address before completing a move to our own new home. But, despite what we think of them, it looks like the wasps like us. The signs are appearing once more or rather the wasps are, all around the house. With any luck we'll have moved before they become too much of a nuisance again. But just in case I've been looking at old episodes of 'Grand Designs' in the evenings hoping the that the wasps are also watching and will try much harder this time - something with a mezzanine floor and open fireplace at least!...

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Tuesday 5 April 2011

Convict













A stripper of beds
A ripper of CDs
A ringer of bells
With a villainous ease

An attacker of food
A whipper of cream
A beater of eggs
Just hear that ice scream

A crusher of cans
A cracker of jokes
A choker of sobs
'N that's not all folks

A stabber in dark
A grabber of bites
A puncher of holes
They're all in my sights

A danger to shipping
A dasher about
A pusher of bikes
"What more!" you all shout

A murderer of song
A killer of time
A shooter of film
I confess every crime...

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Monday 4 April 2011

Wrapper

I pride myself on being an expert gift wrapper so ready for Mother's Day here is my guide:

Step 1 - Measure the gift against the paper - I don't mean get out rulers or theodolites but there is nothing more frustrating than pulling the two ends of the gift wrap together and getting that "I'm sure this shirt fitted last week!" feeling

Step 2 - Have tape to hand and pre-cut before starting - This way you don't need to resort to weighing down the two ends with another object (scissors, elbow, cat, etc.) while you search for the tape (or worst the end of the tape!)

Step 3 - Ends should be folded using this simple method - Place gift so bottom face is facing up / Fold down top face on one end / Slowly flatten to cover side-facing edge to create 2x side-triangle-flanges / Pinch flange edges flat / First fold in first flange to side-facing edge / Second set second flange section to mirror manoeuvre of first flange / Flatten newly formed bottom flange / Fold up flange / Position cat / Find tape end / Remove cat and secure / Repeat

Step 4 - Never use what you consider 'nice' paper - Your efforts to persuade people to "save the paper" will always fall on deaf ears and any attempt to hand them the 'reverse engineering' instructions of Step 3 will be ignored

Step 5 - Never use too much tape - This is especially true when dealing with a gift for a child. If they can't get that paper off in under 3 seconds the present will discarded as they proceed to the next gift (or handed to you to open which would be just plain ironic)

Alternatively you could always use my wife's method:
  1. Get a gift bag
  2. Drop gift in bag
  3. Sorted
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