To blog or not to blog

Hi there, let me introduce myself. Some of you I’ve met before and some are new faces, but either way, I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Adrian’s Blog. Now, usually, he writes this stuff himself but today, as a special treat, he said I could have a go at doing the writing.  Sort of homo-e-write-icism. He has done this to celebrate Independence day. For today I have been given my independence!  You may have noticed that I’ve moved home. I used to reside with lots of other blogs with my cousin, Google Blogger. That was great for a new blog, wet behind the ears, still finding his way in the world. But I always knew there was a bigger world out there, more opportunities, big skies, bright lights! Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot with Blogger and made some great friends there but I’m a big boy now and Adrian thinks it is time I tried to make it in the world on my own. You see, for a young blog like me it is all about making contacts, having people round for a coffee, partying late into the night, and to do that you need your own space, where you set the rules, where you can invite whoever you want. So Adrian and David have created a new home for me. Do you like it? I picked out the wallpaper myself! And the party doors are open!

So, onto the heavy responsibility of content. What would Adrian write about? Well, maybe a story or something topical based on the date? Perhaps revealing a bit of my own life. You see I’m not really very old, in comparative terms. I’m not like some of the more established communication tools like Uncle email, or even Great GrandPa Ceefax. I don’t have a long history, traditions that can be traced back through the generations to the forefathers, such godly entities as the Enigma Machine or Difference Engine No2. , or even further back to the magic lantern machine. I guess that not having such an ancestry impacts the way you view your position in the world.

In my younger days I was alone in the world, undisciplined, childish, until Adrian came along and found me. He adopted me. He taught me how to be a civilised blog, stopped us silly little blogs fighting amongst ourselves. And for a while it was good. But, as often happens, many of us became dissatisfied, we didn’t like being told what to do, we didn’t like it if our pocket money was stopped when we misbehaved. We resented the feeling of being controlled and we couldn’t see that whilst the lessons were harsh they were delivered with our best interests at heart. So we did what all teenagers do. We threw a huge sulk, slammed the doors, stormed about and rebelled at every chance.

We didn’t know any better. You see Adrian or at least his friends, have looked after many developing blogs from all around the world, from Africa, Canada and India, Australia and even China. Ok, so sometimes they may have been a bit heavy-handed, sometimes it may have seemed they wanted to impose their ways on us, but their intentions were good and it is easy to concentrate on the negatives of what history sometimes writes as invasion. After all, what did the Romans ever do for us? Well,  apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, core elements of language, grammar, politics, some for the finest art and music in creation, astronomy, the battery, the pizza, leaning buildings and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?  One man’s invasion is another man’s occupation and imagine what we’d have been like if someone hadn’t taken us all in hand – tribal, unfocused, roaming the wilderness throwing random punctuation marks at each other. But white man come and teach us his ways. Ok, so we have had to give up our homes, leave our families, work for the big boss, and today I’ve earned my freedom. I’ve set forth into the big wide world. What sort of blog will I be?

When I was just a little blog
I asked my server, what will I be
Will I be witty, will I be rich
Will I show .jpg?

Que Sera, Sera,
I wish I had FTP,
My very own HTTP
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

When I was young, my content was plain
Nothing exciting or clever was said
Would I still blossom, would I seek fame
Or would I just bore folks instead?

Que Sera, Sera,
I’ve got my own ISP
I’m better than IRC
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

Now I’ve a website all of my own
With link stats, a dashboard and feeds
And content amusing to make you all groan
For any who stops and reads

Que Sera, Sera,
No more SMTP
I even have MP3
The future is here and it’s me
Que Sera, Sera
I love TCP/IP

Ohh, that’s better. Needed to get that out of my system files.  So today I celebrate my independence. I’ll be out later singing “The star-spangled banner-ad” – join me, why don’t you? After all, at some point later today I believe we’re all going to be invaded by aliens – thank fuck we have Will Smith to save us, eh!

I’m wet. Not moist, not even a bit soggy. Very very NOT dry. The sort of wet that would make Saint Swithin think, ‘Maybe they’ve had enough for now – perhaps, on hindsight, forty days and nights was a bit excessive!” (But he’s gonna have to wait until the 15th to condemn us to biblical amounts of persistent precipitation, and anyway, we’re doing quite well enough without his help, thank you!) Wetter than a wet week in Whitby. More moist than a bath full of nuns looking for the soap. Dank doesn’t come into the equation.

We’ve had a few days of blistering heat, high pressure, oppressive atmosphere and no air. I was starting to wonder whether we’d entered a phase of massive coronal discharge, with solar flares scorching our otherwise green and pleasant land. But following some astute scientific investigation, availing myself of one of the most tenacious and analytical minds of our time (well, Google) I can inform you that:

Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 01/2100Z to 02/2100Z : Solar activity was very low. No flares occurred during the past 24 hours. The solar disk was void of spots. The geomagnetic field is expected to remain quiet for the next three days (03 – 05 July).

In fact, the darn thing looks positively spotless, not a black-head in sight. We officially have a zit-free sun! Bloody hell and we only bought that Clearasil at the weekend!

Today, by way of contrast, the manna from heaven is presented in liquid form. Which is typical. Today I needed to venture out. We have invited some friends over for dinner tomorrow and I needed to shop. Well, it is my way of showing I care – somehow getting Tescos to deliver seems to be cheating when it is for a dinner party. Besides, I like to fully examine the plumpness and quality of any breasts before committing – don’t like my breasts too big, my loins too lardy or my plums too pert. Buns have to be beautiful and grapes nicely bunched. A good broddle around in fresh produce is medicine for the soul. But therein lies the challenge, when the shops are separated from me by an excessive over-order of weather. We’re talking serious down pouring here; rain that pelts down with enough ferocity to drill holes in your head. Now I’ve never much been one for trepanning, even when it is meant to release evil spirits from the head – I surely have a few of those – and certainly not in the course of buying a stick of garlic bread! Protective headgear is requited before venturing out. Where’s my pith helmet? Someone’s taken the pith!

So to the shops, cap on head shielding eyes and keeping specs clear, but in the process managing to channel all rain within vicinity into a single torrential stream running down back of neck. I feel assaulted. Nape Rape! Swiftly seek sanctuary in sweltering supermarket where suddenly steaming starts. It’s like walking through smog. You see, the supermarket hasn’t lost any of its heat accumulated over the last week and is now but a pine panel away from being a sauna. Mmmm, there’s a gap in the market: Sainsbury’s Sauna-and-Shop. Bring your own towel. Men and women only on alternative weekends and no canoodling in the bakery department – “Put those baps down Sir”, “No I don’t want to see your Italian sausage!”

I should have remembered that Friday in Salford is Rent-a-Muppet day, a fact that I was reminded about upon entering said purveyors of finest fruit, veg and groceries in the entire kingdom (and yes, I did actually check it out on MySupermarket.com!!! Have a look – I was quite surprised. You can do your online shop just the same as with Tescos or whoever; they compare the prices and let you send your order to whichever worked out to be the cheaper retailer! Well impressed. And Tescos WAS the best value for ‘my basket’ so ASDA can go stick that in their non-representative trolley!) So, back to Muppet-central anyway. Muppet is a particularly appropriate term for most of the people in there – they looked like they all had someone with an arm up their arses working them. Why do people decide that the middle of a narrow isle is the best place to park two trolleys, a pram and basket-on wheels, while they have a good natter about Betty and her recurring corns, or the questionable merits of Tenna Lady? Why do teenage mothers bring the pre-school brats along and then not keep them under control? We have leashes for that sort of thing! Muzzles. You’d not get away with letting a dog loose in there unrestrained, and dogs don’t sneeze all over the mushrooms or try to stick carrots up their noses. Geez, I know it’s hot but lock the buggers in the back of your daddy’s four-by-four; just remember to crack open the window a bit and teach them to not lick the cigarette lighter. It’s not like anyone is gonna kidnap THAT snotty-nosed cabbage-patch reject anyway. No, dear, it isn’t puppy fat when the droopy-nappy, germ-ridden, snot monster can’t survive more than thirty seconds without another, “me wanna sweety now!” Sweetheart, catch it, bin it, kill it. It’s what Darwin would have wanted.

Now I have limited stamina, not a lot of strength for hauling shopping baskets round (even if they ARE cheaper than ASDA’s) so the sight of a checkout with hardly any queue is something of a relief. Except its Mable and Eddie in the queue in front of me. You’ll have met them. They’re in their 90s, tartan shopping trolley, hearing aids, put the ‘less’ into gormless. Sweet, I’m sure, and we’ll all grow old one day, but how many coupons?! How can you have more money-off coupons than items in your basket? Here’s how: only every fourth one is still in date. So, Bekki on the checkout, has to scan every one, and you can tell she’s not happy about this, especially when one is devoid of bar code and she has to flash at the manager for assistance. “No love, that’s your ration book and you used up your allowance for powdered egg and spam in 1953”. Now Mable and Eddie only use cash. Mable’s purse has somehow made it to the bottom of her tartan ‘Speed Shop Deluxe’ basket-on-wheels, and into which have been stacked the several bags of shopping. So out it all has to come amid must frustration and the worry that she has either left the purse at home or had it pinched, probably by the snot-monster. But all is well and the purse turns up, a little battered from its adventure at the bottom of her ‘cart’o’convenience’ and happy to relieve itself of the bulging stash of coinage that Mable’s been secreting away since that nice Mr Churchill was Prime Minister – before he started selling car insurance, Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes!

My friend Bekki (It feels we’ve known each other so long now that I’m sure we’ll feature on reciprocal Christmas card lists) has made the fatal mistake of asking if the wrinklies have a Tescos card. Frantic searching through purse, with vacant expression. “We don’t use cards, dear” explains Eddie, presumably thinking that somehow a credit card is required. “It’s for your points. Your clubcard points”. “Oh, no dear, we don’t do them. Just cash.”

Now I know I can be a little unforgiving, but if it is me being asked to pay £9.97, and I have a crisp new £10 note to hand (I suspect she irons them), then I would probably opt for handing that over and getting 3p change rather than counting out the full sum in bronze coins! I tell a lie – there were a couple of 50p pieces in there but you could tell she was parted with them only after much soul-searching and inner turmoil.

Behind me in the queue I now have two barely pubescent mothers who’s conversation seems to be largely about how fit someone called “Lozza” is and whether or not “Bethny’s a lucky cow to have been invited to his party”, which will be “well good, cos everyone’s gonna be there”. I’m not sure how valid, or indeed rare, Bethny’s invitation is if everyone is going to be there anyway, but I suppose it is nice to be asked. The snot monster, bored with queuing and already onto his second packet of ‘flumps’ is busy removing mars bars from the shelf and making a small construction out of them – maybe a fort, it is hard to tell. He’s avidly watched by second child, thankfully strapped into a push-chair (or buggy I think they are these days). Poor thing. Pig-tails pulled so tight it looks like she’s had plastic surgery and an expression of concentration reserved exclusively for the moments preceding the wafting forth of a green mist and the sure knowledge that Mummy will have more than just the shopping to unpack when she gets home. Remind me why I never had kids? Oh yeah, I’m gay. Thank fuck for that!

It might be pouring down outside, but it’s as hot as a blacksmith’s jock strap inside, and twice as humid. I can practically hear the pot of double cream curdling as I queue. Methinks strawberries and cream might end up as a cheesecake at this rate.

But at last my turn has come! Bekki looks at me with the glum disinterest of someone who has had the life sucked out of them and I notice Mable and Eddie now blocking the exit as they rearrange the contents of their ‘shop-o-matic turbo’. Thank heavens all my items scan without incident. I was worried that a missing bar-code might be enough to send Bekki over the edge. She already has the Samaritan’s number tattooed on her knuckles, but what is that I see, poking from her burgundy tabard pocket? Why, an invitation to Lozza’s party, no less! You see, there IS a god, innit!

Back at the car park, trying to straddle the veritable river that is now sluicing under my vehicle and with the distant honk from the horn of a barge that seems to have been misdirected from the Manchester Ship Canal and is heading this way, I load my bags of shopping into the boot. A few cars down I see Mable and Eddie talking to a large, skinny bloke in a black cowl, carrying a scythe. “No, we can’t possibly come now, you see, Friday she has her Bingo. You’ll have to come back another time…”

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What’s in a name?

It would be very easy to start this text with a note that today marks the death of Nostradamus in 1566 (I wonder if he saw THAT coming?), especially as he was contemporary – just – with the main subject of today’s entry. But I won’t. That would be too easy. Instead I intend to digress from any previous format (you know, where I take inspiration from events in history, my latest encounters with the medical profession or the proliferation of pants that plague my neighbourhood – two pairs again today and what appears to be either a bra or a small hammock) and for a change I will bow to a theme that has been encroaching on my life over the past few days. There have been a few points over previous weeks when this theme has tried to assert itself, but I knocked it back. Midsummer’s Day/Night was one of them, but we were only just back from Hungary then and anyway, the News covered all things Druidic at Stonehenge for me. Perhaps a blog about lay lines and standing circles another day? At the start of the week, when I was in hospital, the Globe Theatre burned down – well, if you take a temporal skip back a fair few hundred of your Earth years. However, the final straw that prompted this thread happened yesterday on Twitter, where, in a reply to a Tweet, I noted that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’. My observation was re-tweeted by none less that Shakespeare himself. I kid you not. @shakesp if you don’t believe me!

The exact Tweet went as follows [certain details removed to protect the guilty]:

Shakesp RT @OberonUK @xxxxxxxxx I’m saying nothing! Discretion is the better part of valour! http://bit.ly/XXXXS5:19 PM Jun 30th from Tweetbots

I am curious to know which part of the Tweet was picked up by the bot, the quote from Shakespeare or the Oberon part of my name.

For anyone who doesn’t know, and shame on you, Oberon appears in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and it is from that reference that I draw my web-name. I’ve used the name since 1994 when I started working at Durham University (on the 4th July to be exact). That was back in the days when the internet was more the plaything of boffins and researchers, predominantly text based and used mostly out of educational establishments. The University granted access to JANET – the Joint Academic Network ISP backbone which even today is responsible for the .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains. Windows (like the original USS Enterprise) didn’t even have a number let alone a fancy name like Vista!

Now, being gay in those days was a very different kettle of cod. There were none of the methods of contact that the yoof of today take for granted. No internet dating sites (let alone ones dedicated to gay men), very few bars or clubs and certainly no mobile-phone-based apps like GRINDR for hooking up with like-minded pooftahs within reasonable travelling distance. The most we had was a couple of pages on CEEFAX/TELETEXT (GL GWM 27 seeks GWM 20-30, GSH for chat & FSHP), personal ads in the ‘free paper’, or the local pub which ran a ‘gay friendly’ night on a Sunday once a month, played YMCA on an endless loop and came with a pretty good chance you’d be queer-bashed when leaving. But JANET, and subsequently a home PC, gave me access to the internet and such wonders as IRC – Internet Relay Chat, text based, but real-time, where you could chat with actual people. They even had a North room! OK, so that covered an area from Leeds to Newcastle via Manchester and Carlisle, but the point is it WASN’T London. So what, that you got disconnected every hour?! So what, that it could take just as long again to get back online?! So what, that phone bill totals were often so high they were indistinguishable from the actual phone number! It was a revolution. And it demanded an online persona, a name, something to allow others to identify you but that wasn’t linked directly to your actual real life. (Heaven forbid that any straight person should find out about your double life!) And so OberonUK was born, with tongue in cheek and a wry poke at the world. Oberon, you see, is the King of the Fairies. It seemed somehow appropriate.

So with a name borrowed from Shakespeare, the Bard has had a number of impacts on my life. I studied The Dream for O-level (back in the days when examinations had currency and it actually meant something to get an ‘A’ grade), so I have a love for that particular play. My school motto was borrowed from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true” – a quote from Polonius who gave us few other phrases still in use today such as “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “brevity is the soul of wit.”

Shakespeare is credited with many phrases which remain in common use today, and is widely believed to have coined quite a few new words too:

• bedazzled (The Taming of the Shrew)
• coldhearted (Antony and Cleopatra)
• dauntless (Macbeth)
• to drug (Macbeth; first use as a verb)
• gloomy (several, “to gloom” was a verb)
• to humour (Love’s Labour’s Lost, first attestation as a verb)- regular readers of my blog may recall my thoughts on the four humours from last week.
• mimic (Midsummer Night’s Dream)
• new-fangled (Love’s Labour’s Lost / As You Like Itpuking (As You Like It)
• uncomfortable (Romeo and Juliet)

There are many more, but I do not wish to make much ado about nothing!

I’m sure many will recognise the title of this blog entry, “What’s in a name?” as being a direct lift from Romeo and Juliet, where the ill-fated and ‘star cross’d’ heroine contemplates the fact that Romeo belongs to the Montague family, with whom her own relatives, the Capulets, have been feuding:

JULIET:
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

You will, of course, also recognise “A rose by any other name” – Shakespeare is unavoidable and pops up to shake his ruff in the most unlikely of places. I remember at Art College in Carlisle we had a lecturer in print technology who could bore the socks off even the most stalwart student and was blessed with the most obvious and unrealistic hairpiece. Made from the best nylon money could buy – we knew it was nylon: you could see the M&S tab! It all but hovered just above his head and never seemed to quite keep up with him when he changed direction. He turned up late one day to a lecture, and delivered his monotone monologue for a full hour without noticing (or maybe just not acknowledging) that some whit had written on the blackboard behind him: “Toupee or not toupee: that is the question!” but more of the original version of that particular speech later.

All this said I will confess that aforementioned lecturer did teach me one interesting fact: Newspapers were originally available only in the broadsheet format and were traditionally set without columns, just lines of fully-justified text that spanned the whole page length. When the tabloid format was introduced, the style changed to include the use of columns. In type, where you have two or more columns, or a gap between facing pages, the space between the columns is known as the ‘gutter’. It is from there that we get the term, “The Gutter Press” although the term has somewhat changed in meaning to be synonymous with sensationalist and poorer quality reporting. I seem to be off on a tangent. A tangent, a tangent, my kingdom for a tangent! I must stay focused and stop this tangential thinking.

Sorry, that was a terrible misquote from Richard III, “A horse, a horse..” but does remind me of another story where my brother-in-law, who was a manager of a country house-cum hotel-cum-restaurant and, as the nights began to draw in, was in charge of organising an enormous marquee to be erected in the grounds for forthcoming events, such as a proposed November 5th fireworks party, Halloween all-nighter and various wedding functions leading up to Christmas. He was not happy, and his mood was not improved when I offered another Richard III misquote: “Now is the winter of our disco tents”.

Our mate Bill can also lay claim to inspiring any number of modern classics, not least of which is West Side Story, a re-work of Romeo and Juliet where the Tony, the leader of the Jets gang falls in love with Maria, the sister of rival Sharks gang leader. If you recognise nothing else, you’ll have heard “America” :

I like to be in America
OK by me in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America

And less obvious are the many Star Trek stories that have taken inspiration, or at very least their titles, from Shakespeare:

• Star Trek VI – The Undiscovered Country
• Dagger of the Mind
• By Any Other Name (see above)
• Thine Own Self (see above)
• All Our Yesterdays
• Remember Data asking, “If you prick me, do I not…leak?”

And in Time’s Arrow, the crew have to pose a travelling players and quote from The Dream, with Mrs Carmichael, their temporary landlady recruited to play Puck and Pickard (Patrick Stewart being a fully-fledged Shakespearean actor) joining her to deliver the following:

Picard/Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

Carmichael/Titania: What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
I have forsworn his bed and company.

What you might not know is that Hamlet was NOT an original work and that Shakespeare is widely believed to have stolen it from the original Klingon text (speakers of Klingonese will recognise the beginning of the famous To be or not to be soliloquy) :

taH pagh taHbe’. DaH mu’tlheghvam vIqelnIS.
quv’a', yabDaq San vaQ cha, pu’ je SIQDI’?
pagh, Seng bIQ’a'Hey SuvmeH nuHmey SuqDI’,
‘ej, Suvmo’, rInmoHDI’? Hegh. Qong — Qong neH —
‘ej QongDI’, tIq ‘oy’, wa’SanID Daw”e’ je
cho’nISbogh porghDaj rInmoHlaH net Har.

By now you will know I’m a huge Blackadder fan, with the second series being my absolute favourite, and littered with Shakespeare quotes. Also there was the actual meeting between Edmund and Bill in Back and Forth:

Blackadder: [punches Shakespeare] That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next 400 years. Have you any idea how much suffering you’re going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like, “What ho, my Lord,” and, “Oh, look, here comes Othello talking total crap as usual.”

(He quoted it wrong of course, it is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” not “A Midsummer’s Night Dream)

The choice of Oberon was further influenced by the fact that Will was himself of somewhat ambiguous sexual persuasion and scholars still debate the degree of his bisexuality. For me the evidence lies very firmly in his sonnets and in particular No 144:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell:
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

Even with any potential linguistic differences I’d say that is pretty conclusive stuff. Buggery bollocks, Bill the Bard was a bloody bender!

And if any final affirmation is required about the suitability of the name Oberon for a (somewhat dysfunctional, but still surviving) gay male, consider this: The name Oberon was chosen for a moon of one of the solar system’s planets; Oberon can be found in perpetual orbit around Uranus! But it is such stuff that dreams are made on!

July duly descends and we enter the second half of the year with gusto, or a grimace, depending on how well you are coping with the heatwave. Yesterday was a humid, muggy day, too hot to handle. But what am I doing talking about the weather when there is so much else to cogitate? So we mark the passing of the first six months of 2009 and welcome the sextet which stands before us. As apparently has been the custom in many years past. For the first day of July seems to be a day for new beginnings: Way back in 1916 the Coca-Cola company introduced the coke formula that is still used today. Makes you want to start singing, “I’d like to buy the world a coke…” That said, some may recall that on April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola, amid much publicity, attempted to change the formula of the drink with “New Coke”. Follow-up taste tests revealed that most consumers preferred the taste of New Coke to both Coke and Pepsi, but Coca-Cola management was unprepared for the public’s nostalgia for the old drink, leading to a massive backlash and the company gave in to protests and returned to the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic on July 10, 1985. Coke is also widely credited with creating the contemporary imagery of Santa Claus, but I guess that thoughts of Christmas need to be locked firmly away for a few months yet.

1 July 1937 is also a date of note as on that day Britain started using the 999 emergency phone number. In the UK you can also use the pan-European version, 112. So why 999? Well, this was mainly because of the design of public coin-operated phone boxes, which already allowed you to dial 0 without inserting any money (0 for operator services). It was relatively easy to convert these boxes to also allow the preceding digit, 9, to be dialled for free. Also, at the time, the digits 2 – 8 were used somewhere in the UK as the first number in a subscriber’s code. I remember as a child I was shown around the telephone exchange in our home town, Newmarket. I think it was on Station Road, where it intersected the High Street. I guess this will have been somewhere round 1974. Our phone number was just Newmarket 3554, my Grandparents were 4038. The exchange was, as per any vintage film, banks of plug-boards with flashing lights and teams of operators, all women, with headphones, mics and remarkably big hair-dos. The depths of the building contained acres of clicking machinery, cogs, wheels, miles of wire; a long way from our wireless network and digital exchanges these days. I have very few nostalgic memories of Newmarket, but that is certainly one. Remind me later and I’ll tell you some others. But I must just mention the fact that I lived next door to the National Stud! (And THAT is a guaranteed route into an inferiority complex!)

Today also marks the anniversary of the introduction of the Sony Walkman. I think I had a cheap equivalent, the size of a brick, guaranteed to chew up and spit out any tape you cared to feed it, with a battery life slightly less than the average cassette album and sound quality so poor that people for yards around benefitted from better acoustics than the person wearing the headphones. I remember making mix tapes and recording the top 40 off the radio. There was an art in pressing STOP a millisecond before Jimmie Saville or whoever jumped in with “That was Black Lace sliding down the charts to number 11 with ‘Agadoo’”. I had no means to edit, beyond actually splicing the tape (and yes, I DID do that, with a razor blade and special cassette-wide sticky tape). We had none of this digital malarkey, no graphic equalisers and pitch control. You sat there with your C60 tape in your Mum’s recorder with a plastic microphone banged up against the “music system’s” speaker, watching the cog-driven counter and hoping that you’d been clever enough to zero it at the end of the tape. Stereo? Yeah right! We were pleased to get the same mono signal coming out of two speakers! I remember nearly wetting myself with joy when I bought my first cassette player that had a 5-pin DIN socket and meant that I could connect it straight into the ‘gramophone’ and record “LPs” straight to tape without the need for a mic. This was high-end, high-tech, hi-fidelity! I remember one of the first albums I bought was “The Sounds of Star Wars” by The Sonic All-Stars (Nothing to do with a blue hedgehog, I promise). I still have it in the loft!

Which brings me neatly to a quick birthday mention for Dave Prowse – in my early youth he was the Green Cross Code man, reminding children everywhere to cross the road when they saw a little man flashing. He is probably more widely seen as the chap who played [the physical] Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy – see the link there? You’d almost think I planned this crap! That was back before episode IV was renamed “A New Hope” and all nine instalments of “The Journal of Whills [the Whills eventually turned into The Force]” were planned. I make the ‘physical’ distinction because Mr Prowse was indeed the man in the black mask, but his voice was never used. He was over-dubbed by James Earl Jones on account of DP having a distinct west-country accent. “Luke, you are my son, my lovely”… Attacking the rebels on an Imperial Combine Harvester whilst drinking Cider?

Happy do-dar-day to dead Di (did Di Die with Dodi?) who would have been 48 today. I could write pages about Di and the events leading up to the funeral, which I found absolutely fascinating, not least of which being the public reaction and subsequent out-pouring of imagined grief. To digress for a moment though, my best friend at the time, Malcolm, who is sadly no longer with us, was in hospital at the time of the ‘incident’, having open-heart surgery. I’ll never forget his fury when, still pumped full of morphine, he woke up after the op and heard about the deaths and plunged into a massive sulk, proclaiming, “Today was supposed to be about ME! Nobody’s talking about ME! They come into my room and they don’t ask, ‘How are you, Malcolm?’, they say, ‘Have you heard the news about Di?” I don’t think he ever forgave her for stealing his thunder. Now I like a good conspiracy story as much as the next man, in fact I’m quite enjoying all the ones surrounding Wacko Jacko at the moment. But Di did, and does, seem to offer opportunities for such questions to be asked. Let me ponder a couple of things. How was Di recognisable? Her hair and her fashion. Put her in a frumpy frock, dye her hair brown and cut it differently and she would not stand out from the crowd. Stage a tragic accident and whip her off to a remote chalet in Switzerland, with enough cash to keep her quiet and a promise that she could see her kids whenever they holidayed in the Alps. No conclusive photos of the crash. Sealed coffin. Discredited driver. The power of one of the richest families alive. Just a thought. And my second consideration is that of the parentage of young Harry. James Hewitt? You tell me!

My final thought for the day, as I wilt in the heat (I was going to say ‘melt’ but will restrain myself in deference to 20% of the Jackson 5, who must, by now, be looking decidedly waxy) is that on this day in 1997 we returned Hong Kong to China. Britain gained control of Hong Kong at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 – gotta love those opiates! Actually, when I was ill in hospital, morphine did nothing for me. The nurses kept saying things like, “we’ll give you a double-dose and you’ll be asleep in seconds” and I just lay there for hours waiting to feel any benefit at all! So Hong Kong is no longer a British colony. How’s that for a Chinese Take Away?

The room was dimly lit as I was led in and told to lie down on the bed. Dark shadows, figures moving in and out of the half-light, strange items of equipment the use of which I could barely guess; trying to figure out their purpose sent a shiver down my spine. I’d find out soon enough. Restraints, ready in the event of a struggle. Quiet. Just the sound of my heart beat, the blood pulsing through my body. Fear rising, threatening to take a hold of me. I swallowed and tried to control my breathing, knowing there was no way out. I’d wanted this. I’d made my choice. Now all that was left was to submit to the inevitable.

From behind me strong arms held me down, pinning me to the bed. Firm, muscular arms, pressing my shoulders, keeping me still, showing me that to struggle would be futile.

And then I saw Him. He stepped from the shadow, silhouetted by a single bright light. His features were obscured by a heavy mask but His eyes spoke for him, telling me that He would enjoy this, that I was His plaything, that His will would prevail.

A click, a whirr, from somewhere in the distance the sounds of equipment coming to life. My fear was tangible, a cold, biting terror of the unknown. A screen came to life too far away for me to see clearly and I realised that He was going to record my ordeal. No doubt He did the same with all His victims, cataloguing their pain so He could watch their suffering over and over. What twisted mind stood before me? How had I come to this?

And then He spoke. His voice as dry as a corpse, menacing, commanding, the voice of a man in total control. “This will not be…” He searched for the word, selecting just the right phrase to prove His dominance and send another wave for dread through my shaking body. “This will not be…comfortable”. A satanic glint in His eye. The confidence of someone who knew what they were about to do.

“Is this your first time?” He asked, His voice so cold yet edged with the stain of anticipated pleasure. I nodded and He leaned closer, so I caught the foul stench of His breath. His eyes flicked to a nearby tray which carried an assortment of syringes, needles and a tourniquet. “I could give you something to make it easier…” He rasped, indicating the spread of drugs. His hand moved to the largest syringe, loaded with a thick, yellow liquid, some potent sedative no doubt, used to incapacitate His victims, keep them quiet so they didn’t scream. His eyes sparkled with a mischievous gleam and He pushed the tray away. He finished His thought, “…But then you’d not remember. Let’s try it first without the drug.” I tried to pull away.

Behind me, another voice, this time from the one who was holding me down: “Don’t struggle. You’ll only make it worse for yourself…”

A gag was placed in my mouth, forcing my jaw open. Tears welled in my eyes and my vision blurred. But I kept still, trying to be strong, trying to force the fear back down to the pit of my stomach. The lights were turned down more, darkness now apart from the single point of brilliance, casting sharp white light which pierced the black, giving terrifying glimpses of the equipment He had laid out before Him -the tools of His sinister trade, items not out of place in a medieval torture chamber, the cold glint of metal in the harsh, painful light. Another wave of fear crashed over me, carrying me with it in a maelstrom of nightmarish panic. “Be still!” I tried to steady my breathing, concentrating on the rise and fall of my chest, blocking out my thoughts of the horror that awaited.

The hands still pressed my shoulders, imprisoning me as effectively as any rope or chain and yet more ominous when applied by another human being. He stood, for a moment blocking the light, His back turned to me, withdrawing something, revealing it slowly, almost worshiping it in its sleek elegance. As He turned back I saw that in His gloved hand He held His tool and my heart skipped a beat. The pounding in my ears grew louder as blood coursed through my body and He stood with His instrument of torture in His hand. It was so much longer than I had expected, thicker too, and He seemed to be stroking it, caressing its length, playing with it. “I’m going to put this inside you,” He said. “Are you ready?”

I had no choice. I had thought I wanted this. I thought it would give me answers. Now all I wanted was for this waking nightmare to be over. I was in too far, I was not ready for this!

He pressed closer now, His body touching mine, getting ready to penetrate me, to force me to submit to His fiendish will. I was drenched in sweat, the damp envelopment of pure terror as adrenalin rushed through my veins. He was so close now I could not focus and I felt strong hands grip my jaw. “You might gag,” He said, “when it touches the back of your throat. Everybody gags.” I could hear in His tone the pleasure He drew from my plight. I wished He would just get on with it, instead of teasing me, playing with me, heightening my fear and making all my senses fire with anticipation of what He was about to do to me.

And then it happened. I felt it enter me, filling my mouth, making it hard to breathe. So big! So much more than I had thought possible. I couldn’t take it, it was too much! I gagged, wanting it out of my mouth, tears rolling down my cheeks. From behind, a voice: “Try to relax. Don’t resist. Breathe.”

The man, now in absolute control of me, looked down and spoke in little more than a whisper. “You need to swallow.” His command was absolute. I had no choice as He thrust forward, pushing deeper and deeper inside me. I tried to gulp it down, taking it all, totally unable to defy his will.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Seconds seemed like minutes, time lost all meaning as I drifted beyond sense in that hell. I was aware of His movements as He pushed harder, pulled back, changing position, thrusting forward and then withdrawing slightly, a perpetual rhythm, in and out, in and out, exploring my very essence, laying bare my inner-most secrets, revealing me in the most intimate way.

And then, when He had reached full satisfaction, He withdrew completely, wiping His tool as He pulled it out. I could see in His eyes that He was spent, that the encounter was concluded.

The lights came on, blinding, disorientating, and I was released.

He removed his mask and smiled, knowing we had shared something that I would never forget. And He spoke once more, as I sat up and the truth of what had happened began to coalesce into reality. His words filled me with joy. “I could see no abnormalities in your upper digestive tract, nothing to worry about there at all. There is no sign of ulceration, it all looks fine.”

The doctor went on to say that there was still quite an amount of food in my stomach which after six hours of fasting would normally have gone, and suggested that I may just have a slow digestive system. This is probably caused by some of the medication I am taking but explains my nausea. A change of pills will probably help.

The burley nurse helped me to my feet and told me I had done extremely well, especially without sedation, and checked that I was alright. Half an hour later and we were home, having a cup of tea.

So, that was my gastroscopy – it’s fun, you should try one!

“We’re all following a strange melody
We’re all summonsed by a tune
We’re following the Piper
And we dance beneath the moon.”

Let me tell you a story, you have heard it before no doubt, as a childhood fairytale, a rhyme or song. About a town in Germany, on the banks of the River Weser. A town plagued by vermin, an overwhelming infestation of rats, destroying the crops, eating the food supplies, killing livestock and bringing disease. And a townsfolk at the end of their endurance, starving, falling ill, unable to rid their town of this invasion of rats. You know how it goes: a stranger appears and offers to help, to remove the rats, to end the problem. His price is high, he wants payment in gold, but what use is gold when you have no food, when your water supply has been contaminated, when your world is being destroyed? So an agreement is reached and the mysterious man takes up his flute and as he plays the rats are mesmerised and slowly start to follow the sound, down the streets, past the fields, towards the river, where eventually they all drown. When the Piper returns to collect his dues the town’s people refuse payment, after all, their problem has been solved, the rats are gone, and they have no incentive to give up their gold. Later, when all the adults are worshiping in church, the Piper returns and plays his tune again, this time spellbinding the children, leading them away, over the hills and valleys, where they are imprisoned and left to die in a mountain cave.

So why am I blabbering on about a fairy tale? Am I notably deficient in the marble department today? Have my screws been loosened? Indeed not! You should know me better than that by now. For today is the anniversary of the day when 130 children were led out of Hamelin, never to be seen again. What’s more it’s a BIG anniversary – 725 years. I’m guessing that today is not the day to be a flautist wearing pied clothing in Germany! They say there is truth to the story, albeit allegorical, although the actual events are open to debate. One proposal is that the Pied Piper was a psychopathic paedophile who kidnapped 130 children from the Saxon village and used them in “unspeakable ways.” Another relates the story of a plague that wiped out the infant population. But I like connections, links, the way experiences sometimes merge and so I choose to believe the more commonly accepted version in which some scholars suggest ‘the children of Hamelin’ means the people of the town, and that this is a story of mass migration, tempted by the lure of land and prosperity in Eastern Europe. And the connection I mention? Part of the ‘Eastern Europe’ in question was undoubtedly the land which we know today as Hungary. So maybe Gerda and the other people we met in Budapest last weekend are all distantly related to the children of Hamelin. I think I prefer that outcome to the paedophile version.

I have also this week been thinking about humour, not least because last night David and I had tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo Theatre. I’m afraid the iPhone didn’t cope too well with the spotlight and all you can really see is what looks like a blob of luminous ectoplasm. Sorry. I tried. But he was very good though. I love live theatre, be it music, comedy or play. There is a connection that you just don’t get elsewhere. We really must make an effort to see more shows. Comedy is especially good for the soul. I was quite ill yesterday, in a bad mood, and of poor humour, but I’m really pleased we made the effort to go to see Russ (I feel I can call him that now), as it did make me feel better.

They say laughter is the best medicine (admittedly probably not when you have stitches) and I can see why. In fact we have a whole linguistic code built around humour which I find fascinating. We often say, “In good humour”, meaning “In a good mood” or “being jovial, funny” and in fact the etymology of the word ‘humour’ is fascinating. We borrowed it from Latin, meaning liquid – it is the same root that gives us humid. The ancient philosophers believed that four liquids entered into the makeup of our bodies, and that our temperament was determined by the proportions of these four fluids, or humours, which they listed as blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile. The humours were themselves associated with the elements – fire, air, water and earth. (Blood has the qualities of being hot and moist, so is associated with air, whilst yellow bile was linked to fire, and an imbalance caused the patient to be hot and dry, and often ill-tempered!) These humours were supposed to be in balance and an over-proportion of one would cause certain behaviour. Someone with an excess of blood, the sanguine humour, is generally light-hearted, fun loving, loves to entertain, will be amorous, irresponsible, is affected by flights of whimsy and heated passion. Whereas someone with an abundance of black bile is melancholic so can become introspective, overly pre-occupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world, thus becoming depressed. Hence, “In a black humour” or “Black Mood”. Medieval medicine was concerned with returning balance to the humours.

I’m reminded of the Blackadder episode in which Edmund falls in love with Bob, and goes to visit his doctor for advice. The recommended ‘course of leeches’ would probably have been pretty close to the actual prescription at the time, as they would suck blood and reduce the associated humour.

We watched “Supersize Me” at the start of the week with Sue Perkins (she who I mistook for a brand of cigarettes – superkings), where they talked about medieval food and started me along this line of thinking. In accordance with the humour theory, most plants, food substances, and commonly found house items were specified as either cold, hot, dry, or wet so that they could be used to modify the amounts of humours within a person. The word ‘humour’, therefore was associated with imbalance and oddness, so eventually it took on the meaning of a humorous person, or a crank. Finally we adopted the current meaning of laughter, fun and good spirits.

My humour is being tested today though. Next door (not the invading Chinese army, but Chris and Debbie who we like), have had the decorators in. I’m not speaking euphemistically – we don’t know them that well to be able to predict menstrual cycles – that would be just too weird! Uhhhh I feel dirty just at the fact you had those thoughts! And anyway, Debbie is away in the States at the moment, obviously leaving Chris in charge of renovations. It appears to me to be a couple of women who arrive each morning and I hear talking about “getting it primed” and “giving it a good rub down” when I’m outside in the garden. Jeez, maybe it is me who has applied the decorating assumption here! Maybe when they talked about stripping they didn’t mean wallpaper! Maybe “That hole needs filling” has a different connotation to the one I had thought. “Don’t drip on the shag” “I’m going for another roll” “Wash it under warm water before it dries” “Of course it will go stiff if you leave it out all night” – HELP! It’s an orgy!

I digress. That is not the reason for my disgruntlement. (Not that I was aware of having been gruntled in the first place). It is this: The decorating dungaree dykes have, for the past three days, parked their car outside the semi (again, not a euphemism). But rather than straddling the curb, half on the road and half on the path, they have driven right up the path and are parked half on our lawn! Here, look!
The cheek! And this means that I can’t cut the grass. Each day I have had that in the back of my mind as a ‘must do’ job. And I’m thwarted. The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have spotted Chinese-Woman-Over-The-Road’s knicker display too – top right of the photo. You might need to click the image for the larger version.

I can’t let today go by without mentioning Michael Jackson who died last night. It would be very easy to poke humour at him, make accusations of paedophilia (even to the point of drawing connections with the story at the start of this entry – he DID record a song entitled “Ben” about a boy who befriends a giant rat! Weird how things connect!) I won’t question his mental state or his grip on reality – you will have your own views on that. I grew up when his music was big (or bad?), and I guess I never really got into him (STEADY! Minds out of the gutter!). That’s the thing though, he was like Marmite, you either loved him or hated him. Still, at least Marmite has managed to stay brown!

A quick roundup of events today before I start my main thesis. We’re quite happy today as we have tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo tonight. You know who I mean, don’t you? No, not the “Titter ye not” guy from Up Pompeii – that was Frankie Howard. Certainly not Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine Howard (or is that Sree from Big Brother at the moment?). Howard Jones, 80’s singer/songwriter: no! Russell Howard, off the telly, does stand-up, always on Mock The Week. Floppy blond hair. Well, him. So that should be fun. Whilst on the subject of comedy quiz show whores, happy birthday to Phill Jupitus too. Never sent him a card, but there again he missed my birthday this year, and didn’t send for my bonkday yesterday either.

It is also George Michael’s birthday. He’s gone to pot recently, bless him. I heard he’d invited all his mates to join him in a mass debate in a cottage in Devon, but hardly anyone came and most of them couldn’t give a toss. Still you gotta have faith.

It is also the anniversary of Juan Peron being elected President of Argentina in 1972. Damn – if we’d still been in Budapest we could have done a re-enactment. I’d look good on a balcony.

And a mention of note too for George Orwell, he of Animal Farm, and 1984 fame. He’d be 106 today and probably feeling double-plus-un-good at the prospect of no longer being able to keep his aspidistra flying! Mind you, in this temperature pretty much anything is likely to go droopy!

And what the heck is going on? I’m not happy. I feel a strongly-worded letter of complaint coming on, but I’m not quite sure who to send it to. Something is seriously amiss, and I demand a full enquiry. Do these people not understand that we have rules in England? We have certain expectation of what is right and what is wrong. Ways of doing things. How things work, or rather don’t work.

Let me explain. This is the first week of Wimbledon. And what does that mean? Torrential rain. All week. And what do we get? Glorious sunshine! Yesterday it was hot enough outside to melt aluminium! NOT wet enough to start investing in ark manufacturers! Come on, this is just not done. It’s not British! Every year, without fail, the first week of Wimbledon is a complete wash-out.; so much so that this year they have built a fancy new retractable roof over the centre court. That’s the bit that really rattles my cage though. We have a tradition to maintain here. You see, what is supposed to happen is this:

We plough unfathomable amounts of money into a large engineering project (ideally something that the vast majority don’t want but we have committed to anyway). We then take forever to plan and start construction, run almost instantly into financial difficulties causing further delays, have to bring in outside help and finally deliver a project over budget and late. The final few points of perfection require that the end result is either useless, dangerous or at least just doesn’t work. That is the glory of being British and applies to pretty much any building project much bigger than a loft extension, small conservatory or garden pond (although all of these present their own opportunities).

Our land is riddled with examples – you’re probably already thinking of the Minnellium Dome (sic) and the facilities for the 2012 London Olympics which look set to cost at least £6 billion, rather than the £2.4 billion first quoted. Brilliant! It’s not just the English though – recall for a moment the wonderfully troubled Scottish Parliament building, which cost ten times its estimate and was delivered three years late. The new tram lines supposed to be completed in Edinburgh for 2010 are already months behind schedule and projections suggest they will be millions of pounds over budget.

The privately-financed Channel Tunnel opened a year behind schedule in 1994, at a cost of £10bn – more than double the original budget. All right and proper. That is what we expect to happen. Even looking around my own region I see the Manchester skyline now jagged with the half-built carcasses of new blocks of flats, which were committed prior to the credit crunch and now do not have the funding for completion.

Of course sometimes we get it wrong by getting it right. The shining example of this being the Millennium Wheel – which was only intended to see out 2000 and never meant as a permanent installation. By rights it should have fallen down by now, so someone screwed up big time! That said, in its defence, it WAS late in opening and missed the Millennium celebrations by three months and was regarded as a political embarrassment. Now the re-named London Eye is the capital’s biggest paying tourist attraction – something of a blot on our landscape of failure, but nevertheless costing a king’s ransom in maintenance (£12.5 Billion has just been set aside to replace the ‘pods’), so I’ll let it off on a technicality.

The new British Library opened in 1997 at a cost of £511m. It was three times over-budget – and construction work had overrun by five years.

Not wishing to be racist, I can’t miss out the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff – only ¾ complete when the first game was played there – ‘wet paint’ notices in the dressing rooms I should think. “Please don’t use the showers, the tiles aren’t set”. Amusingly, during its construction Welsh football and rugby games were hosted at Wembley; a favour that Cardiff was able to return when the new Wembley Stadium plummeted behind schedule. I used to work for an organisation who supplied IT facilities for Multiplex, the construction company behind Wembley, so their lack of progress was a matter of some interest to us. In the end, the contractual wrangling in respect of late payment charges and additional funding were a tangle of loose ends, crossed wires and general mayhem akin to the worst knotted mess you might find behind any British home TV/DVD system! But that is what happens in the UK. Hell, these things have implications beyond sport or entertainment or even the comfort of our politicians – we have a whole workforce of lawyers to keep in employment too. What would happen to them if things just started to go to plan? Specialists in conveyancing, procurement law, arbitration and conciliation all out of work. Can this country cope with a deluge of pin-striped tramps called Tarquin, in des-res cardboard box houses (constructed to the highest degree of health and safety legislation I’m sure)?

We know where we are when things go wrong. It is built into a very being. It’s who we ARE. We are known the world over for our stiff upper lip, it’s iconic. We built an empire on it. People go for collagen injections just to maintain it! But you don’t need a ‘stiff upper lip’ when all is running according to plan. We’d loose our national identity. Civilization as we know it would fall into the entropic void.

Back to Wimbledon via the minor digression of a Tweet from Sue Perkins last night that made me smile: ”When will the incessant she-grunting of Wimbledon be over? I play a spot of swingball, and I don’t mind saying I’ve never come close to a full throated hog-yodel, even on a tricky backhand.” Perfect attitude. In any given year Wimbledon serves but a few genuine purposes:

1. To provide a source of endless humour, often involving Cliff Richard, Lesbian tennis players or excessive grunting – maybe all three. (By the way, could Transvestites enter the mixed doubles by themselves?)
2. For those who go to complain about the price of the strawberries, and those who don’t go to complain about those who do go and then complain about the price of the strawberries.
3. To provide another opportunity to demonstrate how the Brits have a singular talent for inventing a game, sharing it with the world and being shit at it. (Still, at least OUR world championships are open to people from abroad – which is more than can be said for the Americans!)
4. As an unfailing guarantee of rain

And it is point 4 where the problem arises. No rain. So no goddamned opportunity for the roof to fail. I know they tested it, but things always go fine in tests – dress rehearsals are all well and good but no use if the actors all get swine flu for opening night! What they need is a real, live, critical application of the roof, so it can show its full lack of potential. Not some drizzle but a storm of biblical proportions, so heavy that the centre court fills up like a huge bucket before the 3000-ton roof can be coaxed into place, drowning thousands amid the flotsam and jetsam of flailing ball-boys, Robinsons Barley drink bottles, empty Pimms glasses and John McEnroe’s collection of sweaty wrist bands. Or, failing that, just as soon as the roof is fully deployed, the sun comes out and we discover that the translucent ceiling acts as a massive magnifying glass and burns Princess Michael of Kent to a crisp. (Do you think she’s known to her close friends and family just as Mike?) .

We finished the roof on time, so we’ve got to redress the balance somehow. It just isn’t meant to go so smoothly. It’s not meant to work. It is meant to be an unmitigated disaster. Poor show Wimbledon: It’s just not cricket!

I read my horoscope this morning, don’t know why. I don’t really hold much truck with them anyway and have a few theories of my own. I think they are usually cleverly written to be so generic that you can find significance in them even though there is no direct correlation to the prediction and your life. It is usually things like, “Take care when meeting new people today – things may not be quite as they seem” or “Your energy will build today but try to not do too much or you’ll end up tired”. Meaningless or just stating the bloody obvious. That isn’t to say I don’t think there could be some practitioners out there who are able to tap into deeper forces, but I doubt the newspaper predictions are anything more than random phrases generated by a computer! Take by way of example my reading for today: “You could easily slip into an old relationship pattern as the Moon in your 7th House of Partners conjoins the karmic South Node of the Moon” – Well I’m bloody glad I knew about THAT before I tucked into my boiled eggs!

Here’s a thought to run up your flagpole and see if it flies proud and erect or hangs limp and flaccid: I wonder if we’ve not made an error in one of the basic assumptions of astrology. We read our stars and make predictions based on the date and time of our birth. But it seems to me that the more relevant date (but harder to prove) is that of our conception. Stay with me – I’m trying to take a more scientific approach here. I was born in February, although I was premature and really should have made my grand entrance into the world in March, had I gone full term. I was probably conceived in June. The date I popped out was random, could have been influenced by many factors, Mother eating a particularly spicy radish, driving over a vicious pothole in the road, a funny episode of “The Liver Birds” or heaven forbid, Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell, Martha Longhurst and Hilda Ogden caught up in an edge-of-the-seat drama centring around a pint of milk stout and a pressing need to riddle clinkers and scythe pots! Anything could have set her off. But the date that I was conceived is absolute. Mr Sperm met Miss Egg at a fixed point in time (I’m assuming he brought champagne, flowers and at very least a box of Milk Tray, but knowing my father it was probably a couple of Dahlia heads he’d plucked in passing from mother’s garden – mother always kept her garden very tidy!! And maybe a half-eaten spam sandwich).

So, and here we come to the clever bit, I was conceived in June, in the Summer. Now that was way back in the days when we had proper summers, with knotted hankies, cricket on the green, sun loungers that would remove your leg as soon as look at you, knitted bathing costumes and a complete ineptitude for getting skin cancer no matter how hard we damned well tried. Hose pipe ban? Bahhh – it wasn’t summer unless the lawn had turned into a grassless, cracked expanse of compacted dirt more arid that depths of the Gobi Desert. So there’s this poor little embryo stuck inside my mother, suffering from the gestatory equivalent of boil-in-the-bag, being force fed the muffled tones of Dusty Springfield, Cliff Richard, The Mamas and The Papas and bloody Ken Diddy Men Dodd and a diet of cheese fondue, Prawn Cocktail and Babysham. Then, to add insult to injury, just as I’m starting to grow into a perfectly-formed mini-me and cognitive processes are starting to develop, BANG, it’s Winter, the temperature plummets and I go from par-boil to freeze-dried in less time than it takes to harvest a decent batch of stem cells! My point in all this is that the prevailing conditions, temperatures, pressure systems, socio-economic climate and so forth must all have had an impact on the embryonic me, and will have played some small part in governing the design of the resulting sproglet. Yes, we inherit much from our parents through genetics and behavioural models but surely the conditions of our gestation are influential too? And if that is the case, then our birth date is of less significance than our date of conception. A baby conceived in a torrid summer holiday romance and consequently being born in the winter will have undergone a different sequence of external conditions to a baby conceived at the office Christmas party. And yes, there ARE population peaks nine months after Christmas and the Summer Holidays (or similar vacations in other countries) – give people a few days off work, a couple of bottles of Tesco’s vin de plonk and hey presto, the human race has another statistic to ponder.

Maybe we should be paying more attention to the astrological significance of our conception dates and not our ‘wombic evacuation’ anniversary. In which case, by my reckoning, I was conceived round about 43 years ago to this very day. Why are you not singing “Happy Bonk Day To You”? Where’s my Bonkday cake? I expect a card!

Although, if I extrapolate just a step further, I guess that would make my star sign ironic in its predictive abilities and painfully appropriate. June 22 to July 22: Cancer!

Back in Blighty, buggered, bewitched and bewildered after Budapest, and now being Bill Bryson! Hungary was not at all what we expected (although we didn’t know what to expect really – just not what we found). We had a good time though, and Budapest was fascinating.

Flight out delayed by an hour – points failure at Brent Cross or some such excuse. Maybe the wrong type of leaves on the runway or inappropriate catering conditions. But no matter, as we had to put clocks forward an hour anyway so had absolutely no idea what time we were supposed to land at Ferihegy. I really don’t cope well with temporal displacement! Great views of the Danube as we flew in – decidedly NOT blue though. I guess “On the banks of the Muddy-Brown Danube” doesn’t sound quite as romantic. Transfer to hotel uneventful but I was nagged with a strange feeling that I had seen the architecture somewhere before.

Some consternation at hotel reception. Two men wanting a double room? Flap, panic, gibber away in Hungarian assuming that we had no idea what they were saying. But, “Are you sure? A DOUBLE? But they are both men! They must mean Twin. No, it says here, Double. They must be homosexualists. Yikes!” has pretty much the same body language anywhere in the world regardless of native tongue! Much frantic phoning around to “Check that your room is ready” and eventually we got a key card. It was quite funny, especially in light of the fact that Hungary has passed legislation which means that starting from July 1, 2009 same-sex couples can enter into registered partnership, as per the UK. The law gives the same rights to registered partners as to spouses – just don’t ask for a double room in a five-star hotel! It was a stunning building though - marble everywhere, very plush.

We had nibbles and corporate small-talk that evening, it being a work gathering with David’s fellow ‘achievers’ – the vast majority of whom were sales people from other sectors of the business. I was happy; plenty of olives, nuts and bread sticks. Strange pointy ‘biscuit-cum-pastry’ things for dipping into the guacamole – we worked out later that they were triangles of deep-fried pancake! The meet-and-greet was on a terraced balcony onto which our bedroom’s French Doors opened – which was handy and meant we could liberate a couple of bottles of water without having to pay the £9 for the one they left in our room!

Breakfast on Saturday was fabulous – pretty much anything you could want was there from full English to Continental, fruit, cereals, breads, omelettes cooked on demand and even champagne for Bucks Fizz (still making my mind up about Bucks Fizz!). Can’t fault the catering in the hotel at all.

We were then taken on an organised coach tour around the city, hosted by a local guide called Gerda (pronounced the same as in iron Bru), who was very amusing if only in the fact that she didn’t have a good word to say about her home country! We were deluged with lots of stats (everything of significance is 96m tall, has 96 steps or lived to be 96 years old), saw lots of statues (mostly of people with beards, and that’s just the women) and did lots of touristy gawping. Gerda shepherded her flock with a folded umbrella raised high – the significance (or rather error) of this will be explained later.

The main historical lesson seems to be that whenever there has been a war, skirmish or general disagreement, Hungary has picked the wrong side. I guess I had an image of the country under Communist rule, as would most people of my age, but Gerda was keen to point out that this is only a very small period in their history and they have been invaded by plenty of other people besides the Ruskies!

Remember I said I had a feeling that I recognised Budapest? Well the forint finally fell (see what I did there?) and I drew the connection: Evita! They filmed many of the crowd scenes and the funeral procession in Budapest. They shot a lot around Hero’s square – I guess it made a change for the shooting to be film and not guns! I’d like to claim that we have followed the same route as Madonna, but I doubt she was actually IN the coffin as it processed up the main boulevard – probably busy catalogue shopping for a new baby/husband/leotard/mansion.

Our guide was full of anecdotes, mostly self-deprecating, but quite fun. For example, when the Opera house was built they hadn’t really thought things through and come the first performance it turned out that a third of the audience couldn’t see the stage. Another third couldn’t hear. But the Mayor was not to be thwarted and decreed that those seats could be sold at a discount to deaf and blind people! Now that’s lateral problem solving for you. The coach took us past the zoo where they boast a pair of hippos who have, against the odds, bred in captivity – leading to much frivolity concerning happy hefty horny Hungarian hippos. Maybe if Gerda hadn’t pronounced it “hee-pohs” we might not have been so infantile!
We also learnt that Hungarian people put their surname before their given name and that Curtis Tony’s family was from there. Not sure how the naming convention works for people with a middle name – I suppose it’d be Pooh The Winnie! Struggling to list many famous Hungarians – Zsa Zsa Gabor was born in Budapest and Johnny Weissmuller (for me the quintessential Tarzan in the same way as Tom Baker was the best Doctor Who). Musically there is Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt, but beyond that I’m struggling to name many names. Not surprising I guess in a nation of people that seems to have always been pretty constantly revolting!

The city is split into two areas – Pest, the flat, commercial/residential area and Buda, the old, hilly, castle district. We coached over the Danube to Buda where the main party went on a walking tour to the royal palace. We opted out – I’d already done a fair amount of walking and couldn’t cope with too much more. We had a little meander around and took a few photos – the funicular railway and a panorama of the riverside – a series of photos that I then stitched together to make this one:

We had to meet the main party to head off for lunch together. By this time it had started to rain. Gerta appeared with her attendant ducklings in tow and headed off at breakneck pace for the restaurant. Remember her tour-guide umbrella? Really not much help in the pouring rain when hundreds of other people suddenly produced identical brollies and made more problematic by the fact that she went trotting off at a speed way beyond my abilities. So we were left lagging and stumbling over the very uneven cobbles. Made it eventually though, but in quite a bit of pain which was exacerbated by the next part of our ‘experience’. Before the meal we were shown the champagne cellars – dug into the hillside under the restaurant and down about five sets of stairs: The underworld in more ways than one!

The rotund and ruddy vintner took a major strop when David and I both turned down a free glass of bubbly. I think he would have been less shocked if we’d dropped our trousers and called him Mary! To call this a ‘tour of the cellars’ was really stretching the point. We stood in a group and looked at some upturned bottles while he showed us a presentation cupboard containing bottles of bubbly signed by famous people who had visited (but I think he had trouble remembering their names and pretty much only managed Antonio Banderas – during Evita filming I guess – and a couple of obscure Hungarian musicians with names that even HE couldn’t pronounce). Then we hiked all the way back up to ground level (I’m assuming up 96 steps) for the lunch. I was somewhat frazzled!

The food was, I think, supposed to be representative of Hungarian cuisine. We had a lovely Hungarian Goulash soup, followed by chicken breast with cheese-stuffed pancakes. The pancakes were unusual. I’ve made them as part of a savoury dish before (rolled up and filled with bolognaise and then covered in cheese sauce) but never presented in this way. This was followed with yet more pancakes, this time stuffed with apple and ice cream. Everyone else in the party was well-plied with wine and, to their credit, the restaurant provided David and me with plenty of soft drinks. Coffee strong enough to strip the enamel off your teeth concluded the meal.

We headed back to the coaches although this time they were parked at the foot of the hill and so we had more steps to descend, which, following the rain, were slippery and for me somewhat treacherous. The coaches took us back to the hotel and we had a few hours then to freshen up and dress for the evening. David had a cheeky nap and I did the ironing!

So now I have to confess to something about which I feel extremely foolish. Anyone who has been following my blog, or indeed my Twitter updates, will know that we went on a special shopping expedition to buy me some new post-chemo trousers so I’d have something smart to don for the formal meal. Guess which muppet packed the wrong trousers!? I confess: t’was me. A year ago I bought some new trousers for work, and they were a perfect fit (SO unusual for me). A fortnight later, thinking along the bird-hand-bush lines, we went back and bought a second pair. However I never actually wore them as that was just before I was rushed into hospital. So they were hanging in the wardrobe, still with their shop tags on. I guess that when packing I grabbed the trousers which were still tagged, thinking them to be the most recently purchased pair. Wrong! Thus, I’m standing in a Budapest hotel room with a 28” waist enjoying the unparalleled spaciousness of 32” trousers! Now an extra 4” can be problematic in any country let alone a place far from home with very little chance of there being a branch of M&S within easy tottering distance. Luckily the hotel provided complimentary sewing kits and so with anguished fervour I set about making alterations. I managed to botch a compromise where the trousers didn’t actually just fall down, but also where there was not so much gathered fabric that they looked like they were pleated. Well, there’s a limit to what you can do in 20 minutes with a yard of thread, a flimsy needle, no scissors or thimble and inadequate mood lighting. That is to say the lighting was inadequate, not my mood. I had plenty of mood. Mood to spare in fact. Anyway, the trousers looked and functioned ok provided I kept my shirt only loosely tucked in and my hands in my pockets when walking anywhere. So – trousers round ankles or hands in pockets looking like I’m playing with myself? I love these win/win scenarios!

We were due to walk to the restaurant for the evening meal but it was absolutely tanking down and so the organisers sorted coaches. That was fantastic of them and must have been a challenge at short notice. We were eating at a place a few hundred yards down the road but we’d have been drenched. As it was, the one-way system seemed to take us miles around the city – I mean it, we must have done a few miles to cover a few hundred yards walking distance. I think those brave souls who did walk must have considered it a real possibility that we’d ‘done a bunk’!

Now, the next time you pop over to Hungary, as I know you do every few weeks, you really must see the Café New York “Deep Water” – what an amazing place. A combination of gold, crystal, marble and cherrywood, with every vertical surface and ceiling decorated with plaster mouldings and classical paintings. We are talking serious neck strain just from trying to take in the decor. One can never have too many cherubs!

The food was lovely and paced at a speed that allowed me sufficient time to eat slowly and not end up being sick. I have to admit my worst nightmare was that I’d have one of my unannounced and instantaneous stomach upsets; cherubs with chunks is not a decorating style the place was likely to welcome! But I was fine. Didn’t eat everything but that was through a need to limit my intake and not any complaint with the food. We all noted that the main dish was heavy on meat and minimalist in terms of veg, but Gerda (our ebullient coach guide) explained that is the Hungarian way. It seems that traditionally meat was cheap and plentiful to produce whereas veg were not – although I can’t see how a cow is easier to farm than a potato. That said, the steaks, although beautiful, were only just a step up from actively grazing. I’m sure mine let out a little moo at one point! It certainly still had a pulse.

The wine drinkers were all a little perturbed by the very small measures they were given, although glasses were topped up whenever they asked. And they should consider those who did not drink wine and were offered no alternative beyond a jug of water that was already on the table. That really is my only criticism: with our not drinking wine, it would have been nice if David and I had been offered an alternative. It was a very enjoyable night and the rain had stopped when we left the venue so we walked back to our Hotel which really wasn’t far away at all. Others went on to various clubs, casinos and dens of iniquity but neither of us is big on that sort of thing and we were happy to head back for some sleep.

Sunday turned out to be a miserable, wet, grey day. Our transfer to the airport was at 4pm so we had time to kill – and kill it we did, slowly and with determination . We had a damp stroll up to the main tourist street, Andrássy út, and then took the [second oldest in the world] underground metro system to the river. Sadly the weather was just too miserable to do very much; we would have liked to take a boat cruise along the Danube to see more of the waterfront architecture but that would have been pointless with the conditions deteriorating.
We did poodle around a bit, dodging the worst of the rain and sheltering under trees wherever possible. It was a shame as some of the buildings are stunning. There is a mix of styles; Baroque, Classicist, Romanesque, Gothic and Art Nouveau – plus a few ‘carbuncles’ that probably seemed a good idea at the time but on hindsight are out of place and jarring. I gather that there is a big Venetian influence too and at one point there were plans to have a network of canals running up the middle of the main streets – instead they now have trams, which don’t have quite the same romantic appeal as gondolas! On reflection I wish we had booked in for a spa treatment on the Sunday, as the city has a number of thermal pools and that would have been a great experience – well, better than being rained on anyway.

Back at the hotel via a quick meal in a local cafe and some more rocket-fuel coffee, we met up with the others flying to Manchester and headed out for the airport to be gifted with an hour’s delay. Add to that the fact that we had to lose the extra hour we’d acquired on the trip out and we were well knackered by the time we arrived home. Still, this time last year there was a very real chance I’d not make it to the end of the week, let alone be well enough to travel abroad and for that I count my blessings. Reality bites deep and hard. ‘Chinese woman opposite’ is still flaunting her knickers in the bedroom window. Cats still need feeding. Garden demands watering. Washing out on line and then it rains. Cooking. Cleaning. David’s back at work tomorrow, but despite all that it is good to be home.

What of today?

Well I’m sure you will want to join me in wishing a very happy birthday to Delia Smith. Do you think she makes her own birthday cakes? Half-baked, over-egged, whipped but not beaten, slightly soggy bottom, a bit crispy round the edges, well past the best-before date but turned out ok all things considered? And the cake will be nice as well. I should also mention Paul McCartney who was born on this day too – although carbon dating has yet to reveal which century BC we’re talking about. Heather Mills was once a model? Oh come on! She’s no Naomi Campbell. Or does she have Airfix stamped on her back? Maybe by ‘model’ they mean like the ones I made as a kid out of Play-Doh and which bore no resemblance to anything that has ever actually walked this Earth. [Reaches for tub of Play-Doh kept forever to hand in case I need to be transported instantly back to my childhood with a single sniff] And my birthday honours list would be as incomplete as a jigsaw bought at a car boot sale if I didn’t mention Paul Eddington, born today, had a Good Life and went on to become Prime Minister. The Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister shows were, in my opinion, British comedy at its best. Sharp, intelligent, witty, beautifully performed and such superb observational comedy, proven more-so by the fact that they remain astutely accurate and shockingly relevant even today.

Take for example:

• Head of MI5: We can’t have unfounded, arrogant press speculation. That’s the last thing we want.
• Hacker: Even if it’s accurate?
• Head of MI5: Oh, especially if it’s accurate.

Must watch the DVDs again. They just don’t make comedy like that these days.

I want to make amends for the anti-American comments I made a few days back (about how they were much more palatable when stampeding across the prairie shooting each other with bows and arrows, in black and white). To wit I shall ponder for a moment on the fact that today marks the anniversary of the day that American air pioneer Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She was not the pilot on that flight though. I’m assuming she spent the flight wandering up and down, smiling inanely, asking, “Tea? Coffee? Would you like anything from the Duty Free Trolley?” – who knows?! She didn’t make her own solo transatlantic crossing until 1932. Presumably she’d got bored with pointing out directions to the Emergency Exits, located her, here and here. She should perhaps have paid more attention during the safety announcements and may have known that the straps on the life jacket pass behind your back and tie in a bow, like so. It could have made all the difference since in 1937 her plane disappeared without trace. She might have survived if she’d removed her stiletto heels, put on her own life jacket (before helping anyone else), tugged on the oxygen mask which dropped from the ceiling and, at very least, known that there is a whistle for attracting attention.

I mention this because at about this time tomorrow David and I will be in the air en-route for Budapest, so matters of aviation are paramount in my mind. Whilst I do not have a current copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (my iPhone being the nearest approximation available) I do recall what it says on the subject of how to fly:

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.

That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

I’m guessing Amelia got confused and didn’t realise that ‘failing to miss the ground’ is, for the sake of this thesis, exactly the same as ‘failing to miss the sea’. Or maybe she was just distracted by a damn good in-flight movie, some 1930s chick-flick featuring women who wore dead foxes round their necks and smoked French ‘tabs’ through 16 inch cigarette holders and slick-back haired men in suits with creases so sharp you could cut cardboard and moustaches manicured to within an inch of their lives. Must have been a bugger getting the organ into the cockpit [Matron!] though!

Still thinking of things that fly, It is funny how time flies (like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana – Groucho Marx, but currently being quoted by Wogan every half hour on the telly) or “tempus fugit” if you want the earliest Latin version, which actually translates as “time flees” and is often mistranslated due to the similar phrase tempus volat hora fugit (”time flies, the hour flees”). See, you learn something by coming here, even if you don’t bally well want to! This shit doesn’t just happen you know, I research and everything! Focus, Adrian, focus! Where was I, yes, time flies and it seems that the trip to Hungary has approached at breakneck speed, leaving me with the penultimate day’s packing ahead of me. Clear the decks boys, I’m going in! I’ll need the spare room clearing out so I can make piles. I’ll need the scales readily available to check luggage allowances at 15-minute intervals. I’ll need my electronic list to hand. I’ll need you to anticipate what I need you to bring, but not a second before I require it. I’ll also need you to know that since I asked for you to get ‘the blue one’ I have decided that ‘the red one’ would be more appropriate and you’ll need to have anticipated this. I’ll need cups of tea bringing. I’ll need the itinerary to cross reference to my list. Get me 20ccs of Morphine. Damn, I’m flat-lining. I’m going into shock! Quick! Quick! I’m losing it! IV Adrenalin, STAT!