Pole to Pole

Wanting to have as relaxing a New Year as possible, we elected to venture out today for both groceries (a short, sharp shop) and to see if we could finally find some curtain poles for the study. The first and only place on our list for these was Housing Units in Failsworth and we were lucky to find a reasonable selection of both poles and finials.

Naturally, the pole you want doesn't quite have the finial you want, and the finial you really like isn't available with the pole you decide looks nicest, but that's just life plain and simple. Too much choice and not enough combinations of that choice is a recipe for stress, and a lengthy discussion, deliberation and decision process, which we duly went through.

The situation is complicated by the larger of the two windows being a double sash. It has a casement between the two sashes which is not at the same level as the wall. It's further out. Hence any centre bracket has to be longer than the wall brackets on either side (and the window is, according to received wisdom, too wide to take a single pole without a centre support). A final further complication is that the window frame is set very high in the wall, so there is no gap between the top of the frame and the cornice. Hence the pole can't be mounted above the window as would normally be the case.

After much debate I agreed that the only way around it would be to make a small supporting block for the centre bracket, and screw this to the window frame. This was, in fact, the way it had been done prior to the strip out, but as usual not very accurately, so the pole had quite a bend in the middle. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make a better job of it this time round.

Before we set out today Nikki had found a few places online who would custom-make the poles and brackets, and if we'd decided to go with them we could have had the centre bracket as big as we liked, but as always everything comes at a cost, both financial and in further delay to the project. So we placed the order, benefitting from a 10% sale discount, and returned home feeling well satisfied with our short sojourn.

Friday Five

1. If you could change your name, what would it be?
When I was twelve I thought my name was boring, so I took the chance of meeting a new friend at a family wedding to tell him my name was Chris. Hours later I could hear this voice shouting "Chris! Chris!" so I looked around to see who he was yelling at. It was me, of course. I decided right then I'd better stick with John, even if it is common.

2. What is the worst name someone has called you?
I can't spell it.

3. If you could meet someone famous, who would it be?
Ha ha! You know my track record with meeting famous people. I'd probably dribble all over them. I wouldn't mind meeting Patrick Stewart though, just so I could bring him home for a coffee and casually say to Nikki "I've brought a friend round to meet you."

4. How do you like to travel home?
I drive, but I don't like it. The one part about going to London that I don't mind is the train journey home. Firstly, it's coming home, and secondly I can relax and read, or play games, or write and not feel guilty about not "working."

5. What kind of phone to you have?
It's an old Sharp. I also have an SPV C600 that I've not transferred over to yet. Basically I pick up Nikki's cast-offs every time she buys a new phone (about every 12-18 months). Each one is better than anything I would pick, so why not? She's more of a gadget girl than I'm a gadget guy.

Happy Christmas!!

Just enjoying a quiet cup of coffee in front of the 'puter before we open our presents (during which we'll be sipping a few glasses of chilled Eiswein which has been on ice since last week), and I thought I'd take the opportunity to say "Happy Christmas" to everyone. The "Now Xmas" album is playing as I type (and we'll be putting it on via the XBox when we transplant ourselves downstairs shortly) so the Christmas spirit is alive and well here.

Despite the Spice Girls Christmas Wrapping in the background I still feel a bit philosophical. This is our second Christmas in this house and a lot has happened this year. Two major projects completed on the house, great upheavals at work, but when I look back at how much I've achieved artistically I have to pause. It's a full two years since Annie and I put our first album together, and although we didn't set ourselves a deadline for the second one, progress this year has been dismal. Almost non-existent (we finished the eighth song in April). And on the second major project of mine (which chronologically and from a longevity perspective, should really be called the first project) - my novel - passed the first anniversary of the completion of its first draft back in August without any substantial progress on the editing.

By contrast a friend of mine had his first novel published this year - ironically on my birthday. Naturally I wish him all the luck in the world with that (good luck Chris!), but his success certainly did focus my mind. I've been enjoying writing for TV Scoop and it's true the profile of that site is on the increase (they're now achieving 8,000 unique visitors per day) so there's a lot of people reading my TV reviews, rants and suggestions for future viewing. But on a personal level, that is secondary to where I really want to go with my writing, and I know I'm going to have to give that more focus next year if I'm to get anywhere with it. I have a dozen ideas for other novels and none of them can really start until the first is properly finished.

I don't make New Year's resolutions or set goals, but if I did that would be #1.

I don't usually plan things either, but I know there'll continue to be a lot of work to do on the house this coming year too, with plans to do the kitchen and at least one of our bedroom or the dining room. If that's not to encroach on my writing time I'm going to have to be very disciplined and make sure I do protect that daily space - and it has to be daily - to write write write. I don't want to be looking back again this time next year on another 12 months of excuses and no progress.

Quiet Christmas Eve

Nikki had to work today, just for the morning, so I dropped her off at 8.20 and returned home to finish the wrapping. Incidentally I spotted another cool number plate on the way home: WH05 NXT (who's next). I wonder what he meant? Something rude I suspect, but the car it was on wasn't that much of a babe magnet lol.

On the plan, this morning was for wrapping Nikki's presents, but I'd managed to get that done lunchtimes on Thursday and Friday. I just had a couple to do for the girls and a rather large and unwieldy present for Annie. That was, until the postman called. With impeccable timing he brought the last of Blythe's presents, which I'd given up on. One more for the wrapping pile, and an increase in the success rate for online shopping. I've done well over 90% of my Christmas shopping online this year, and everything has arrived except one of Nikki's. I'm quite disappointed about that, because it was a "big" present, but it's the only one so I don't think I've done bad, and for this missing one I've printed off a picture so I can wrap that ;o)

While wrapping I took the chance to catch up on some TV we'd recorded that Nikki wasn't bothered about watching, namely: Frankenstein, a 2-hour updated dramatisation that had been on ITV in October. A good idea to try and bring the story into the 21st century - they'd created the monster through stem cell research instead of stitching body parts together - but really I had to admit it was a bit crap. I cleansed my audio-visual palate afterward by watching High Plains Drifter; something else I knew Nikki didn't really want to see.

She called at 12:45 to say they were finishing at 1, so I drove over and picked her up and we settled down for an afternoon of Christmas TV watching - there were more seasonal films and programmes being broadcast than you could shake a stick at, the highlight of which was Patrick Stewart in a TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol. There was a considerable amount of Thornton's troffing as well. How decadent!

Going for a croak

We'd been invited to a rather original party this evening - karaoke and pancakes. Whoever dreamt that up needs a medal. Combining two of my favourite things with a little wine and good company was bound to be a great evening.

It was a small but select do, and all the better for that. The pancakes, spread as they were with the traditional lemon and sugar and hence reminiscent of my childhood, were superb and seemed to get better throughout the evening (even though I wasn't drinking much, having driven to the party) but the highlight of the evening as always was the karaoke. Brilliant. If I were to have my time over again I'd move heaven and earth to be a professional singer. Just need to sort a few of those cdg files out, eh Annie? One of them was reminiscent of the karaoke we did in Fuertenventura one year. If you hadn't known the words to the song you would have been knackered, as they were appearing on screen a fraction of a second after they needed to be sung. Doh!

Friday Five

1. What's the last movie you saw?
When I originally filled this in it was Shall We Dance, but we've moved on a bit since then, past Deja Vu to the fabulous oldies we watched today while wrapping presents: White Christmas and It's A Wonderful Life.

2. Are you gentle?
Like a kitten, baby.

3. Do you sleep with your bedroom door shut?
No. Unless either or both of the girls are in the house. Then we all need our privacy. Oh, and at weekends. Closing it helps keep the streetlights out so we can sleep in longer :o)

4. What's your middle name?
Christopher.

5. Friday fill-in:
I could learn to like ___.
Stephen Fry.


Interesting day today socially. We popped round to the new neighbours for a glass of wine and a mince pie as we'd been invited by Christmas card. It reminded me of us, a year ago. They moved in on almost exactly the same date as us (only this year) so they've been in about 9 weeks and the house is still looking a bit unlived in, if you know what I mean. Like things aren't quite in their right places yet. But the welcome was warm and quite a few of our other neighbours were there, so we expected to pass a pleasant 90 minutes or so before making our excuses to leave in time to prepare for the main event of the evening: mulled wine & mince pies at Jamie & Lise's. That was until conversation turned to what movies we've watched recently and one woman said she was looking forward to seeing The Golden Compass. Our host's demeanour changed instantly. "Oh no, you mustn't," she said seriously. "Philip Pullman hates God and his stories are all about killing God. You might think it's a simple story but the movie makers are doing what they did with Harry Potter... they'll draw you in and then in the final instalment you'll be watching them kill God. Don't go. Spread the word, warn all your friends about it."

Honestly, I thought I'd stepped back into the 11th century or something. We just sat there quietly not really knowing what to say. The usual advice is you shouldn't discuss religion or politics with friends and these were people we'd only known for like an hour. I wasn't about to engage them with any high level discourse on how His Dark Materials is set in a fantasy world and even though they're called daemons they're not actual mythic demons. Not, you know, works of the devil. And I certainly wasn't going to get into a debate about how anyone who believes God is omniscient, omnipotent, the creator of everything, could possibly be worried by a story, even if that story does involve killing God. Actually I think if you look a bit closer it's more likely to be about getting rid of the church, which is a different subject altogether. Anyway we stayed long enough to be polite and slipped unobtrusively away. If they ever find out about the ritual sacrifices, we're done for.

We opted to walk to Jamie & Lise's, because I didn't want to have to watch what I was drinking overmuch and because we didn't really have a feel for how far it is. The answer, surprisingly is "not far." Barely more than a 20-minute walk even allowing for the fact that the pavements were icy and the roads even more so.

We stayed until midnight, until the cockles of our 'earts were well and truly warmed by the wine and the great company, and then walked home again. Surprisingly for that time of night it seemed to have warmed up a bit. The cars that had been unused all day were still rimed with frost but those that had been out at some time hadn't frosted back up again.

Christmas Do. (part 4)

Lunch in the staff restaurant has never appealed to me. I always bring my own. Christmas though - that's a different kettle of peaswax. They make a special effort, and I can never have enough turkey dinners, so it's kind of a match made in heaven. Today was even more special, since it's my last day in the office for 2007. Three of us went down from my bit of the office (aside: you can't say "from my office" any more. Not since they went open plan. Time was when we all had offices big enough for small groups. Back then you did things by the office. I went down the pub with my office. I went bowling with my office. Not now. Now they've knocked all the walls down and the desks are arranged in little floats. Two desks back-to-back, arranged in groups of three. So six desks to a float. You can hardly say "I went to lunch with my float" can you? Makes you sound like a milkman.) and the place was really buzzing I can tell you.

We opted for roast tomato soup and crispy croutons for starters. Could have had liver paté or parmahamwithmelonballs. I thought paté might be a bit heavy for lunch time and when I eat melon I like to bury my face in a wedge, not delicately place individual balls in my mouth. Besides it was a cold and frosty morning (yes, Steve and Dave, I'm still playing the "get Christmas carol lines into the conversation" game) so I thought a bit of soup would go down lovely. It did.

Mains was the traditional roast turkey dinner and they had done us proud. Three thick slices of breast meat with a slab of stuffing on top, carrot batons, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, sprouts and as much cranberry sauce as you like. Fabulous. Feeling already somewhat stuffed (we've been dieting for three weeks after that fateful visit to the local club, and my stomach's shrunk) I joined the line-up again for dessert. What else - Christmas pudding. "Watch out for that brandy sauce," one of the dinner ladies advised. "It's a bit potent." She wasn't wrong. I think I had an entire bottle of brandy in my portion alone.

We sat at the table for half an hour after finishing the pudding, debating this and that. It wasn't that the conversation was especially stimulating, more that none of us could move. And all for a fiver, too. When you consider how much I paid to (almost) go without Tiramisu at Don Giovanni's, deciding which was the better meal is a bit of a no-brainer.

It's a wrap!

I wrapped my first Christmas present today. I can't tell you what's in it (obviously!) but I'm quite pleased with it. It looks like a regular box, but it hides a clever little secret. Bwaahaahaaaaa!

We don't have a problem wrapping the girls' presents. We won't be seeing them until Boxing Day, so we can leave them lying around on the table now in various states of undress. But Nikki & I have to dance round each other a bit. I'm planning to make a start during the week on the days I'm at home. Lunch in one hand, sellotape in the other. She'll get her chance on Sunday when I go to visit my Mum and then I have a final opportunity on Christmas Eve as she has to work during the morning.

It's getting quite exciting now that the pile of presents has started to grow.

What goes around does indeed come around

I guess there are some things that you can't blog about. Sometimes this is because it's simply inadvisable to reveal too much, and other times it's because, although something may have gone on around you, it's not really your story to tell.

So by way of allegory I'll recount a tale from my university days. Maybe this explains why the "how old are you" quiz on Facebook declared me to be 75 today. One of my answers was that I start my conversations with "When I was a kid..." Well hey, when the other choices are "You can't even talk anymore"; "wow, did you see those boobs/abs"; "MOOOOOOM..."; "yo, yo..."; and "listen to me..." wtf else am I going to pick? Anyway, I digress.

Around the beginning of my second year at Uni I started going out with a girl and pretty soon we got pretty serious, if you know what I mean. If we weren't staying at mine we were staying at hers and there weren't many nights we were staying at mine AND hers individually. During the holidays I drove down to Buckinghamshire to spend some time with her at her folks' place and was surprised (not to mention delighted) that her parents just quietly assumed we'd be sleeping together. Remember this is 1976/77 we're talking about. The summer of love was ten years old but parents weren't really part of it, at least not in my world.

So time ticked by, we carried on seeing each other, and eventually in the Easter break she wanted to repay the favour and come up to Nottingham to meet my folks. My folks who had always claimed to be very broad minded, and open minded, but who...well...maybe we'll save that story for another day. Let's just say they didn't always practice what they preached. Which gave me a bit of a dilemma. Did I let things ride and submit to sleeping on the sofa, which I knew would be the default option? Or did I make a stand for human rights (not a very well-used phrase in 1977), which would clearly be the more uncomfortable option parentally speaking?

In the end I decided to make a stand. Pun not intended. I took my parents on one side and said, basically "look, Sue and I sleep together while we're at Uni, and we sleep together while we're at her parents' house. This is your house and what goes on here is up to you, but in the light of what's already going on, are you really going to make me sleep on the sofa?" I didn't plead or cajole or try to make them feel inferior, I just put the facts in front of them and then we went out to the pub.

When we got back, there were two Cadbury's Creme Eggs sitting side by side on the pillow in my bedroom. My Dad's uniquely cryptic and non-embarrassing way of telling me they'd decided to accept the inevitable.

Right there and then something crystallised for me. Although it was never in any doubt in a subconscious way, I made a conscious decision never to put any offspring of mine in a similar position, be they male or female. Because to my mind, if a young person is ready to make that kind of decision, then as a parent you have to be ready to let them. During the intervening years, on the odd occasion when this kind of topic has cropped up in conversation with friends and colleagues, I've come in for some stick on this point. The general consensus of the rest of humanity seems to be "you'll feel differently when it's your own daughter," or "no-one will ever be good enough." But I never subscribed to those views while the conversation was hypothetical, and I'm pleased to say I continue to hold true to my decision, and my principles, now the topic has become material.

Heroes - Volume 2

Oh Boy. Spent most of today watching the second series of Heroes. This show just gets better and better. I know Tim Kring is on record admitting that it got off to a slow start, but when you watch seven episodes back-to-back it just ROCKS.

You know you should stop, and make the dinner. Or even stop for a drink or a toilet break. But then you think "nah - one more episode."

I hope they resolve the WGA writers' strike soon. I'll start getting withdrawal symptoms again before long.

Friday Five

1. Are you married?
Not at the moment, although I am in a long-term relationship. With two failed marriages behind me (and the last split particularly acrimonious) I'm kind of phobic.

2. When do your claws come out?
More than anything else the thing that is guaranteed to get me boiling mad and spitting is being accused of something I haven't done. Several nasty examples of this before the age of 10 has made me hyper-sensitive. Often, it doesn't even have to be anything especially important.

3. Have you ever been in a car accident?
Several fender-benders but one really significant and scary event where I hit a patch of black ice, span round twice and rolled over into a ditch. I hung upside down in the seatbelt for a few seconds before releasing the clasp and landing on my head. Dust and grit from the carpets rained down all around me. When I reoriented and pushed the button for the driver's window it opened onto the side of the ditch. Grass. No crawl space whatsoever. I opened the passenger side window and on that side, luckily, the ditch side was angled less steeply. There was a 9-inch gap just big enough for me to pull myself out, which I did - energised by visions of the inverted car exploding in a fireball at any second. When I stepped onto the road I nearly fell over - it was a solid sheet of ice. As my eyes accustomed to the gloom (it was around 6.30am) I noticed another car 30 feet from me which had suffered the same fate. I looked the other way and was just in time to jump out of the way of a third car pirouetting across the road to hit the ditch between me and the first.

When the police brought me back to the car later that day to pick up the rest of my stuff, I could see in the daylight that if I'd left the road 50 yards earlier or later there would have been no ditch to break my fall. A steep embankment fell away 100 feet to the moor below.

4. Who is the last person you held?
Nikki.

5. Describe a time you've gone overboard:
I went literally overboard when three mates and I took a boat on the Norfolk Broads in 1976. We anchored in the middle of a lake and went swimming.

Christmas Do. (part 3)

The final "do" of the year was this lunchtime and was organised by one of the ex-secretaries from our old building in Wythenshawe.

There was a strong sense of camaraderie in that building. When we first went there in 1996 the sense of something new and exciting starting imbued us with a kind of team spirit that has survived for ten years, even though many of the original joiners have since left the company. It was a new venture - the first time we had tried to build a business around Microsoft technologies and application development - and they were exciting times.

The excitement has long since passed, but the friendships remain and we'll probably continue to enjoy a Christmas dinner together every year as long as Chris keeps organising it. At 15, numbers were slightly reduced this year owing to many people working away from Manchester, and as it turned out the ex-staffers outnumbered those of us who are still there. That just meant the conversation was more interesting, as everyone brought their tales of the year's activities to the party.

We started out with a drink in the Paramount bar on Oxford Street and then repaired to Don Giovanni's for the meal around 1.30pm. The meal was nice, but nothing special. Tuscan bean soup followed by the traditional turkey dinner. There was one slight hiccup when the dessert course was served. We'd already waited for it for half an hour when the waiter came around with a notepad. I thought this a little strange, as we'd all placed our food orders over a month before, but didn't say anything except to repeat my request for Tiramisu.

He returned to the table ten minutes later to inform us that Tiramisu was off, and the remaining choices were profiteroles or panacotta. I was really disappointed with this as I'd been looking forward to the dessert all day, and I wasn't really in the mood to take it lying down. I layed into the guy, loudly telling him it was a disgusting way to treat Christmas guests, I'd only come for the Tiramisu, we'd placed our order months before so how could they have run out? I placed an order for panacotta but added I was very disappointed and it was the least bad choice as far as I was concerned.

The panacotta arrived (and between you and me looked quite nice) but I left it untouched in front of me. Ten minutes later the headwaiter came striding across the restaurant, beaming widely and carrying two plates. He'd managed to find two remaining portions of Tiramisu and placed one in front of me, and one for the person next to me. I thanked him graciously and tucked in. It was delicious. When I'd finished I noticed he hadn't removed the panacotta, so I polished that off too. Bonus!

Arseholes

This is what I woke up to this morning. Well, not THIS exactly, because this isn't a photo of my actual car. Funnily enough my first thought on discovering that some little scrote had put a baseball bat through my passenger window was not "oh, I must go get my camera and take a photo of that for my blog." But you get the picture. Ha ha.

Nothing was stolen. Truth is, there's nothing in the car TO steal, but since there was a heavy frost last night, the bastard had to smash the window to find that out. And if it had been one of those rare but occasional days when I'd forgotten to take the car radio panel out? Well then he would have won the star prize. A bog-standard, manufacturer's issue, crappy CD radio that won't play 8 out of 10 CDs and takes an hour to warm up to the point where it will turn on, if you made the mistake of turning it off. Whoop-di-do.

Who buys knock-off car radios anyway? And what would it fetch - a tenner? I would gladly give the twat a tenner just to save the hassle: a very cold and windy drive there and back to drop Nikki at work, staying in all day for the glass repair man and therefore not being able to get the grocery shopping done until 9pm, and an hour sweeping the broken bits off the footpath which, being old tarmac, hangs on to those little bitty pieces like they were diamonds. Oh and the small matter of £120 for the replacement glass and fitting. Which coincidentally is exactly the same as the insurance excess for window damage.

There's just a chance that someone saw me fiddling with my iPod and RoadTrip a couple of Sundays ago and wondered if two weeks was long enough for me to become complacent and leave it in the car, but the most likely explanation is they did it for a laugh. The same kind of laugh they get from smashing the glass bus shelters that we see littering the pavements every few weeks. Funny, isn't it?

Christmas Do. (part 2)

Not a bad night at the De Vere hotel, Daresbury last night (ooh, it do sound posh don't it?). A very nice room, after our complementary upgrade to an Executive King suite (that's a bigger bed to you and me, and very comfortable it was too) caused by the fact they'd over-booked the Christmas do in the "Alice Room" (the whole place has a Lewis Carroll theme) and had to bump us into a smaller side room instead.

OK, the decorations weren't up to much - a single Christmas tree plonked into one corner - and the dance floor was a little smaller, but it didn't affect the food and drink ;o)

We arrived as usual mid-afternoon and spent a pleasant couple of hours sipping drinks, chatting with Nikki's colleagues and, since the diet was once again on hold for the day, tucking into a plate of club sandwiches and chips. This is the best part of the event for me. The meal is just like any other mass-catered Christmas meal, the disco holds no interest whatever and the dinner conversation can be a bit hit and miss, but the afternoon session is the height of civilisation. Comfy seats, a warm lounge, beer (or, in this case, Magner's cider since the draught beer selection on offer was uniformly awful) and pleasant chat. I love it.

We repaired to our room to freshen up around 6 o'clock and returned, showered, shaved (that's just me doing the shaving) and togged up, to the bar for a pre-dinner drinkie around 6.30.

I carried my third pint of Magners of the day into dinner with me and was immediately offered another by Nikki's manager. You can't say no can you? It would be rude. I'd ordered a rather nice salmon roulade to start and a traditional Christmas dinner, which was fine as mass catering goes apart from the sprouts which were like bullets.

The pud was a bit disappointing though. One of those occasions where you stare longingly at what someone else has ordered (in this case the strawberry pavlova) because your own choice is not quite all that (chocolate tart). The coffee was piss-poor too. I don't think I've *ever* had a good cup of coffee in a hotel.

With crackers pulled, hats put on and taken off, balloons blown up and shot across the room and the disco in full swing I began to flag a bit. I was surprised to discover it was already almost 1am so I made my excuses. Nikki was enjoying the disco too much to want to leave just yet, but I was more than ready to sample the delights of the king bed and watch enough snooker to send me to sleep. That is, about 3 minutes' worth.

Sad nerdy geek speak

A few things we needed to sort out this morning prior to going off for the night to Nikki's works' do, chief among them going to the hair salon. Coming back from there, a band was being interviewed on the radio and as is my wont, I was only giving it half an ear.

The band are on tour at the moment, and the lead singer was telling the DJ that they only had 6 gigs left.

My immediate thought?

"Well that's plenty of space."

>sigh<

Christmas Do. (part 1a)

Hmm. Incipient senility. A frightening thing. I was convinced I had three Christmas do's in a row, but the one that was "today" - upon checking - is actually *next* Friday. Oh well...an unexpected bonus for next week!

Christmas Do. (part 1)

First works Christmas do of the year this evening - or I should say yesterday evening given that it's now past midnight - and it had to be in Reading.

Most of the guys in the Technical Group are based darn sarf, so that's where the meal was booked, even though the CTO sportingly tried to suggest somewhere more middling like Birmingham or Solihull. We didn't have anyone in the group who knew a decent curry house round there, so we gave up and resigned ourselves to a long journey.

I wouldn't have gone normally, but the CTO had arranged a meeting for the afternoon (which meant we could claim expenses for the travelling) and I also had a four-hour meeting at 10am which I *could* have attended as a voice conference, but in this case provided another excuse to go along to the meal.

We had about ten attendees from the North, and everyone but me arranged to stay over. I like my own bed too much though, and (thought) I had another Christmas lunch to attend tomorrow...err...today, so I wanted to be back in plenty of time.

The Technical Group meeting broke up around 5pm giving us 90 minutes to drive the 15 miles from Bracknell to Reading, park, and congregate at the nearest pub, which the organiser said was Branningham's. It was pissing down as we left Bracknell. I'd offered a lift to one of the other guys and we passed a pleasant 45 minutes in the rush-hour traffic catching up with what we'd each been doing since we last worked together. After we'd parked, we discovered neither of us really knew where this place was - either the curry house or the pub - so we wandered aimless through the pouring rain towards the Oracle shopping centre - the only landmark we'd been told about. Two nice young ladies pointed Branningham's out to us, but it wasn't much use. The place was a nightclub, not a bar, and didn't open until 9pm.

We spotted the Slug & Lettuce across the water and headed for that, me on the phone to the organiser to explain the situation and arrange the Slug as the alternative rendezvous. I downed a gin & tonic prior to dinner (still conscious of the diet even though the rest of the evening would be a disaster as far as that went!) and having all assembled and wet our whistles, we headed for the restaurant - the Bengal Reef. My passenger and I agreed we would never have found it - on the first floor of a separate mall round the back of the main precinct and down a narrow street that looked more like a service road. Once inside though, the restaurant looked very nice. We were shown to our tables - a 16-seater and a 10-seater - and perused the menus while sipping on bottles of Cobra.

Suffice to say the meal was equal to anything Manchester has to offer, but at 9pm with the prospect of a 200-mile journey ahead of me, I made my excuses and left. The rain continued unabated pretty much for the whole trip home, but at least the roads were clear and I arrived back soon after midnight, tired but buoyed up by the good food and company.

Having started the Christmas celebrations with our mulled wine party at the start of the week, this had been a perfect next step!

What is friendship?

We didn't go to the quiz tonight. We'd been invited by one of the girls from the book club and I was up for it initially, but Nikki had had such a shitty day at work and wanted nothing more than to cuddle up and watch telly. I know she wouldn't have minded had I wanted to go on my own, but sometimes it's more important to be together isn't it?

This small vignette into the complex world of relationships made me think about friendship in the large. If you're a regular reader of these pages you'll know I'm lucky to have maintained strong links with friends I made during my schooldays. I'm told it's unusual for a bunch of blokes to stick together the way we have - for over thirty years and through good times and bad. We've seen our mates' partners come and go, but new partners when they've been found have been welcomed into the group, which has continued to play a big part in our lives for all of those thirty years.

I couldn't even tell you what it is that keeps us together. Maybe it's one of those things that it doesn't do to look too closely at. One of us is a staunch (almost rabid) football fan. The subject bores me rigid. We all love music, but our tastes vary greatly (apart from a shared love of Genesis). Our beliefs too are varied. One comes from something approaching a "high church" family, I'm a Spiritualist, the rest are what you might call armchair atheists. We all work in (sometimes only slightly) different jobs. If I had to think of one thing that keeps us together, it's the shared experiences we've had, and continue to have. We were thrown together at a particular time, hung out, and gradually built up that catalogue of memories that now draws us together like the stitches that make up a tapestry.

But it's not always like that. Lest you somehow get the impression that any one of us is something special - some "friendship guru" to whom others flock looking for those elusive connections in their lives - I have to say that I've had times where I've felt I didn't have any friends at all. Two areas where, traditionally, people make good friendships are university and in the workplace.

While I was at UMIST I got to know three distinct bunches of people: those I lived with; those I studied with; and those I hung out with at the Students' Union, principally on the Socials Committee (which I led, as Socials Secretary, for a year). I met almost all the guys I lived with through sharing a floor with them in Owens Park tower. We got on alright, well enough to decide during our second year to share a house. Since leaving Uni almost exactly 30 years ago I've met one of them again, on one occasion in 1984. An awkward occasion it was too, which did nothing except prove the only thing I had in common with them was the fact that we shared the same space. I didn't much enjoy sharing space with them in my second year either. None of them knew how to wash a dish, or cook anything more complicated than bangers and mash.

The story is pretty much the same for the people on my degree course (which I didn't finish). I can hardly remember any of them now and those I can remember I knew from the off I wouldn't want to stay in touch with. Around the Socials Committee it was slightly different, and indeed I did stay in touch with a few of the guys from there - sharing a house with two of them in the first couple of years I worked at ICL, and socialising with another and his wife who stayed in Manchester. But the ties weren't strong enough for the friendships to last more than a few years.

So I think back and try to put my finger on exactly why they were "friends" and I realise they were at best acquaintances, and in reality probably closer to people you spend time with because otherwise you'd be on your own. You forgive their foibles, turn a blind eye to the mess they live in, agree to go to the pub when really you'd rather have a night in, just to be in the company of a few warm bodies and not left alone because you don't really fit in. Is that the right thing to do? I don't know. I don't know what "right" means in that context. I know we had some fun times and some laughs. Laughs I wouldn't have had if I hadn't made the conscious decision to join in. We drove a VW microbus to a Genesis concert at Hammersmith Odeon once, which was a great night. We took the same bus to Blackpool for a long weekend and slept in it. That was a good laugh too. There's no doubt I would rather have these memories than not. And there's no doubt I would never have had them if I hadn't decided at the time that their company may not have been "perfect" but it was what was on offer. That probably sounds really pompous, but I'm just trying to be honest. It wasn't really even a conscious decision at the time, but looking back it's obvious that none of them was "my kind of people" but that didn't prevent us all hanging out and having a good time. It just stopped us from having any incentive to keep in touch once we were no longer sharing the same space.

It's a similar story in the workplace. I get on with most of them. They're all decent, regular, "normal" people. In some cases I'll have known them thirty years come January 2008 (I'm starting to get seriously worried by the number of times the phrase "thirty years" crops up in these blogs). In one case I sat next to the same guy for almost 12 years. Worked with him day in, day out on a variety of projects. Travelled abroad on business with him. We shared a joke every day - had a very similar sense of humour - and we got on really well. Then he changed department and went to work in a different building. That was five years ago. I think I've seen him three times since then, and we hardly ever exchange emails.

Was he a friend? I thought so at the time. In fact I thought he was probably one of the few real friends I'd made at work. It's undoubtedly also true that if we found ourselves sharing an office again we'd pick up where we left off. But it's not enough for either of us to make the effort to keep in touch. And I think that's the crucial point. Making the effort - either to spend time with people in the first place, or to stay in touch with them when they move on.

But at least we have the excuse now of being separated by a few tens of miles. There are other cases I could quote where the distance between buildings holding old colleagues is a few tens of yards, yet none of us makes an effort to meet up for lunch, a coffee, or a walk around the car park.

I'll probably come back to that another time, this whole topic actually, cos this is already a bit of a diatribe. And then there's the subject of making new friends, which has happened a lot recently and really reinforces the point about making the effort. Meanwhile, there's a piece of old anonymous Internet lore about friends that come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I've linked one example there, but if you Google "reason season friendship" you'll find hundreds more. Not sure it really illuminates anything except why people move in and out of our lives, and it certainly doesn't answer my initial question.

Mulling it over

Last year, our first mulled wine party was a little later than expected and fell foul of a couple of works' socials. This year, we were determined to be first, not only with the decorations but with the partying. Maybe it's a little early to be celebrating Christmas, but at least it is December.

Last night the wine was mulled in perfect time, the nibbles distributed, the conservatory flung wide and heated, the candles lit and the music playing (streaming via the XBox from my PC, of course) when the first guest came knocking at a polite ten past eight. It was our new neighbour, who had moved in only a few weeks ago with her daughter and grandson. She was followed by the rest of the street during the next couple of hours, with only one house not represented and two couples only half present. A pretty good showing and easily comparable with last year.

But this year, of course, we knew everyone a lot better, so the conversation was even more relaxed, the pace laid back and the evening another sterling success. Don't take my word for it, we were told as much by each departing guest.

The longer we're here, the more I love it. One thing though. I mustn't stay on mulled wine the whole evening next time.

Tis the season...

Well the best laid plans did indeed gang awry this week, as the tree stood bare in the hall day after day, its decoration slipping backward in the priorities until we reached the point of no return - today: the day of our mulled wine party.

After a fairly relaxed start we set off for Homebase to get a few extras - candles for the house, a few extra decorations, that kind of thing. Our flabber was totally gasted when we pulled up at White City retail park to find the shutters down and the Homebase warehouse totally deserted. It's closed down! Luckily B&Q (Home Depot for my North American readers) is just around the corner, and proved to have an adequate supply of goodies. More than adequate actually. What we'd really gone out for were curtain poles for the study. What we came back with were three wise men fetchingly rendered in polymer resin, three lengths of tinsel and a pot of three candles.

It was down to business once we returned home, and after spending a little over two hours decorating to the sound of Christmas tunes, the tree was looking fabulous. Even better, if I may say, than last year. But there was no time for idling - we had holly garland to thread up the banister, lounge and conservatory decorations to hang, cleaning and tidying, and sorting out the party music to attend to.

So here we are at a little after 6pm, with everything done. Now all that's left to do is shower, shave, change, eat, and await our guests!

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree!

We're having our mulled wine party early this year. On Saturday to be precise. We got caught up with the office party season last year with the result that two sets of neighbours couldn't make it. Not this time.

So we want the house to look Christmassy and even though we wouldn't normally put the tree up this early, I fetched it down from the attic this evening and assembled it. The idea is it will get decorated sometime this week, leaving us with plenty of time on Saturday for the other party preparations.

The tree, which we bought last year after we moved in having decided to abandon "real" trees for not completely environmental reasons, is a clever design where a central trunk accepts rows of branches into little plastic slots. Each row is colour coded, with a band of tape on the trunk and corresponding bands on the branches. Assembly takes quite some time, but at least having had the experience of last year, I didn't make the mistake of slotting all the branches in before spreading the twigs out. Even so, I was above half way when I realised I'd missed out an entire row of branches. Luckily the "needles" are sufficiently plentiful to mean that it's impossible to notice the gap. I couldn't have reached between the other branches to fit the missing row and I certainly wasn't going to take it back down.

So now our tree sits in the hall waiting patiently for its decorations. Well, I put the fairy on. You have to.

Bookless & Feckless

No book review this month, because I didn't read it. It was "We Need to Talk About Kevin" by Lionel Shriver. Out of all the books I've missed reading, this is probably the one I should have read. The conversation was one of the most stimulating the club has had, and I sat on the periphery thinking it all sounded very interesting.

Next month it's The Life of Pi. Christmas intervenes and there's no club meeting until January, so I might actually get round to reading it given I have twice as long as usual.

I had a phone call from Mother before I went out to the club gathering. She phoned to apologise for being "off" last time we visited (the weekend before my birthday). It was one of those visits where Nikki has to keep kicking me to remind me not to rise to the provocation. In one respect it becomes increasingly difficult not to react - as the conversations become ever more bizarre with her recollections of what has actually happened gradually leaving reality behind in the same way a plane gradually climbs to its cruising altitude - but in another way it gets easier. The more it happens and the more extreme the example, the easier it is to realise she can't help it and indeed doesn't even know it's happening. This particular visit was the most surreal so far, all the more so since the topic at the heart of the argument (or what would have been an argument had I not been kicked almost to death) was such a fundamental and long-standing part of our visits.

Being creatures of habit, we generally have the same thing for lunch each time we visit my Mum: corned beef, oven chips, and mushy peas. She gave up cooking anything more involved than a can of soup or a ready meal many years ago, so we take care of the chips and peas, but this has been a staple of weekend visits to my Mum's for a long time. Five years, easily. Probably longer.

So this particular day, when we'd arrived a little earlier than usual if anything and had been looking forward to the usual banquet, we were surprised to find she'd just eaten. A late breakfast, we assumed, and so we left it rather later than usual to mention lunch. By the time it got to 2 o'clock we were both being deafened by the protestations of our stomachs, so I ventured "you've already eaten then, have you?" in a kind of non-committal way.

"Well, you said you didn't want anything," was the (rather accusatory) reply.

I stood with what I thought was a bemused look on my face. At least, it should have been. I was, after all, bemused. Mum interpreted it as the look I give her when I know she's ... misremembered ... something. I was treated to standard phrase #15: "Don't look at me like that. I know I forget some things but I'm right about this."

Let me draw you aside for one moment to explain how many times I've been accused of doing something, or saying something, that there is no Earthly way I would ever have done or said; how many heated arguments such accusations have led to; and how many of those arguments have ended with something being said that triggers the right memory, resulting in standard phrase #16: "Oh yes, I remember now. You're right John." I can't count the first or second number, but the third is "all of them."

So, egged on by the kicking, I didn't rise to the bait but instead waited for the off-the-wall explanation. It came. Apparently I'd phoned to say we wouldn't be wanting the regular corned beef meal as we planned to stop somewhere en-route and eat before we got there. This was clearly fixed in my Mother's mind, and she believed it was as true as the fact that we were in the room with her right then. But it never happened. I bit my tongue, and mashed a cup of tea to silence the rumbling of our stomachs.

As is usually the way with my Mother, we returned to the subject several times that afternoon. When she knows I don't agree with her she'll try to convince me she's right. Sadly the process for this isn't to bring any additional information into the discussion, or look at things from a different perspective. No, she thinks I'll change my mind if she simply repeats what she's already said on the subject. Which she did. Several times. Pretty soon my right leg, the one nearest Nikki, was swollen to twice its normal size, but I never rose to the extreme provocation. We left early, with the incontrovertible excuse that we had to stop off on the way home to eat.

The theory of clouds and silver linings was given added credence by the fact that we chose, at Nikki's suggestion, to stop at the Dog & Partridge on the A628 just past the Flouch. We walked in to this delightful haven of warmth and hospitality and all the frustrations of the day fell away. They had a roaring fire in the grate, a well-stocked bar from which we chose two different pints of locally brewed ale (both delicious) and a kitchen that served pub food of a standard I have not enjoyed for many, many years. We will definitely be returning, and arrived home relaxed and satisfied.

And so to tonight's phonecall from Mother. "I hope you didn't think I was awful not having any food in, but I've had to defrost my freezer because I can't bend down to clean it any more, so I didn't have your usual chips."

I reassured her that it was fine, but there was more. "I told John [next-door neighbour] you were coming and he said 'corned beef, chips and mushy peas?' [we're something close to a national institution] but I had to tell him I wouldn't be able to do it because the freezer was off."

Discovering the real reason behind the lunch fiasco was, I guess, some comfort. Obviously there was no recollection on Mum's part of the conversations we'd had the Saturday before. Thinking about it later, we decided she'd become confused with an earlier visit, when although we had in fact eaten lunch, we'd later declined dinner because we were eating out with friends in celebration of another 50th birthday. You have to laugh though. Standard phrase #9 is "Thank God I've still got all my marbles. My body might be packing up but at least I've still got my mind." Something tells me I'll be using the "irony" tag on this post.

Going on a RoadTrip

Having spent most of yesterday putting music on my new iPod, today was my first chance to try out the RoadTrip device in the car which, if you remember, was my main reason for getting the iPod in the first place.

Opening the package I was struck by how much bigger it looked than the ones Phil & Ian had demonstrated to me at the lighthouse. Whereas theirs had clipped onto the docking port, with this one the iPod sat inside a kind of cradle, which then had a cigar-shaped jointed tube with which to connect it to the cigarette lighter for power. To be honest my first thought was "that's never going to stay upright" and as it turned out I wasn't far wrong.

The connector fitted into the lighter socket just fine, but the combined weight of the iPod and its cradle made it lean forward, or left, or right, any of which occasionally resulted in the connector popping out of the socket. The package had included an extension tube, so I tried this but as you might have expected if you know anything about turning moments and angular momentum, it just made things worse.

I finally found a position, with the shorter tube, where I could wedge the iPod against the passenger seat and it seemed fairly stable. Tuning the radio and the RoadTrip to a common frequency with no existing broadcast, I was treated to a track from Genesis' "Calling All Stations" through the car speakers. Top! Experiment complete, I removed all the kit and eagerly awaited the evening trip to Yorkshire. I shouldn't have been so keen.

Put simply, pretty much any bump in the road or sharply taken corner would see the RoadTrip pop out of the socket. Once the power was discontinued, the FM broadcaster switched off and the music died. I found the whole experience very frustrating, not to mention dangerous, as I was forced to wiggle the connector back into its socket while driving along. This must have happened at least a dozen times on the 20-mile journey.

On my return home I did some (more careful) Internet research and discovered I'd bought the wrong device. What I really needed, and expected, was the iTrip Auto. That's the one that clips directly onto the iPod and comes with a flexible power cable to connect up to the car. Using this, I'd be able to rest the iPod on the small shelf under the radio and all would be well. Tomorrow's job: contact the supplier and find out how to arrange an exchange or refund. >sigh<

I Pod therefore I am

I finally succumbed to fashion and bought an iPod - a 160GB Classic to be precise.

I don't normally listen to music on the move unless I'm driving, and recently the CD player in the car has been playing up (haha!) and either refusing to play a CD at all, or requiring several tries to get it to start. On top of that it's been exhibiting various strange behaviours including skipping tracks, returning to the start of the CD whenever I tried to legitimately skip a track, and starting to fast-forward its way through tracks without any provocation.

So I was intrigued when a couple of my mates opted for a solution based on connecting a small FM radio broadcaster to their iPods and tuning the car radio to that. The prospect of carrying my entire music collection with me rather than the dozen or so CDs that would fit in the glovebox was attractive, as was the ability to also carry every photograph I've ever taken, so I bit the bullet.

The device arrived yesterday, and I spent most of the daylight hours of my birthday getting it set up. The initial installation wasn't a problem - I downloaded iTunes from the Apple website and installed it in a few minutes - but then it set off trawling my hard drive for music files, video files, podcasts and pictures. This took almost half an hour, mainly because it found over a thousand of the small wav files we used to play in the Coronation Street chat room. I'd forgotten I even had these, tucked away in a corner of my PC I no longer visit, but the fact they'd been found meant I then had to select them all for removal from the list so they wouldn't be copied over to the iPod. I'm sure there would have been an option to stop it looking for wav files, but the process kicked itself off before I'd even had chance to look.

The second issue to bite me was that I'd ripped the majority of our music to my PC in WMA format. A few minutes research had convinced me this was a better format than MP3 when space wasn't an issue, so fully 80% of our CDs were represented this way. Naturally, owing to the continuing animosity between Apple and Microsoft, iPods do not play WMA files natively. The files have to be converted to either AAV or MP3. iTunes does help out in this process - it will do the conversion automatically if you attempt to copy WMA files over - but it can't help with the elapsed time penalty you incur.

I started off with the entire set of WMAs selected (about 3,000) and let iTunes off the leash. After a couple of hours I extrapolated its progress, which gave me an estimate of 21 hours to complete the conversion!

I was just bemoaning the rate of conversion to Nikki when my machine blue-screened, thus introducing me to the third issue: iTunes does not maintain any progress records connected with the conversion. When I switched it to the list of WMAs for a second time and let it go, it started again from the beginning, writing duplicate AAV files to my disc with slightly different names from those it had created the first time round. Doh!

I stopped the process as soon as I realised what it was doing, and deleted the duplicates. Rather than try to work out how far it had progressed, I decided the sensible alternative was to decided exactly what music I wanted on the iPod and convert only that to start with. I also decided it might be more realistic to perform the conversions in bite-sized chunks, so I selected 4-5 albums for it to be going on with and also started the synchronisation process off in parallel to copy over the ones that had already been converted.

Once the sync was complete I disconnected the iPod and tripped over the fourth issue of the day. Selecting "Eject iPod" from iTunes is NOT the same as doing a "safely remove hardware." We have a long-standing issue with our NetGear USB wireless dongles, where if you pull out another USB device that would normally behave itself (like a memory stick) then the wireless transceivers lock up. I realised this may have been at the heart of my earlier blue-screen, since the freeze occasionally renders the driver corrupt and crashes the whole machine. From now one I'm going to have to be extremely careful when disconnecting the iPod if I'm to avoid needing to reboot every time!

Eight hours, four problems, and less than half the music collection sync'd over. All in all a surprisingly frustrating experience for such a "leading edge" technology device and subconscious confirmation that I was right to avoid it as long as I did (I assume earlier versions were even worse!).

Safety first

Found myself with a little time on my hands this afternoon, so I thought it would be worth opening one of the packages of Roman blinds we brought home from Ikea from the Lighthouse weekend. After the experience with the curtain poles, I didn't want to arrive at the point of putting them up only to find something essential for the fitting is missing.

I needn't have worried. There's a cute little plastic bag attached to the blinds containing everything necessary, along with a warning message that had me laughing out loud.

WARNING:
Accidental strangulation by dangling Venetian or Roman blind cords can be prevented.

Well, that's reassuring to know ain't it? I'd hate to think it was a foregone conclusion.

A whole new world

We were leafletted the other day to inform us that a new branch of Slimming World was starting to meet at the social club just around the corner from us. Now I've never been one for "organised slimming." My Mum went to Weightwatchers years ago and I have to admit it was her most successful dieting experience ever, until she reached the age where her appetite said cheerio and headed off over the hill never to return - now she never stops bragging about how slim she is, despite the fact that it's not due to any herculean effort on her part.

But the thought of a roomful of women (because let's be honest, at least 95% of them would be) clapping each other as their new weights were read out has been enough to keep me away...until now.

Having been on an upward trend weight-wise for the past 15 years or so (you might even say for the past 50 lol), and having watched a similar "improvement" in Nikki since we got together, we came to the mutual conclusion that it might be worth a punt and so, at 7pm on the dot, we made the long walk around the corner (it's about 300 yards) to the parish centre and poked our noses through the door.

A large circle of chairs had been put out in the function room, surrounding a table laden with books and magazines featuring people like Gloria, who had lost 4 stone. She looked very happy about it, which is more than could be said for the people occupying the first ten or so chairs in the circle. We took our seats and then spotted a coffee bar. Unfortunately, the urn ran out of hot water just as I reached the head of the queue, but as I didn't have any other pressing engagements, I waited while the urn was refilled and reboiled. Well, partially boiled, which was fine for Nikki as she was having coffee. My tea tasted like warm water that had passed through an oily rag and I made a mental note to also have coffee in the event we should ever return.

Turned out that the meeting was being run by a new girl. A very popular new girl, since she seemed to know most of the twenty people who were now occupying seats, but she needs to learn something about starting a meeting on time. 7pm it said on the flyer and we didn't really get into our stride until 8. One of her assistants handed out members' packs and invited us to fill in our details (we held fire), after which we got started. The leader read from the info pack, telling us all about green days and "original" days (I'm sure they used to be called red days - maybe that's too political for them now, but if that's the case they should have come up with another name for green days too), healthy extras, syns and all sorts of other stuff that blurred into one as I became more and more desperate to leave.

My estimate of the male-to-female ratio had been bang on (there was one other bloke there, and he was, how shall I put it, not exactly "blokey") and when we got to the part where the regulars started having their weight loss shouted out, and each result was greeted with a resounding round of applause, I turned to Nikki in utter despair. Luckily I could see she'd come to the same conclusion, and at the earliest opportunity we beat a hasty retreat.

Don't get the wrong impression though - we're determined to do it. We just don't want to put ourselves through that every week, and have to pay for the privilege! No, uber-researcher that she is, within a couple of milliseconds Nikki had already found, bid and won all the SW resources we could ever need off eBay (she even found someone who was selling the SW website password each week for £1.50 a pop - she only has to sell it three times to cover her membership fee!) and had downloaded a slew of recipes.

The next few weeks will tell if we have the staying power to "go it alone." Just the thought of possibly having to admit defeat and return to that awful meeting will be enough for me, I'm certain!

I can't believe it's not curtains

You know how it is when you put off a job you really don't want to do? I told you a month ago it was curtains and it still isn't really - they've been sitting in their packets on the study floor since we bought them, and we've each been struggling to see our screens on those sunny afternoons when the low sun streams in through the still-uncurtained windows.

Finally, I could stand it no longer and went in search of the curtain poles we took down before the replastering. We didn't really like them, we didn't want to put them back up, but we couldn't find anything we did like and regretfully decided we'd have to refit them as a temporary measure. I hated the idea of drilling our pristine new walls, especially when I knew we'd eventually find something else and in swapping them over there'd probably be filling and patch-painting to do.

I needn't have worried. Fate took a hand. My window, being double-width, had two separate poles joined in the middle with a ... um ... joint. A wooden ring into which the two ends, left and right, fitted and which was originally screwed to the central pillar between the two windows. I found the poles. I found the ring. But the fitting into which the ring slotted, and which took the screws to fit it to the pillar? Gone. How tragic.

The curtains still aren't fitted. We went and watched Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix instead. Much more agreeable.

A place for everything...

When we moved back into the study after the extended decorating saga the objective uppermost in our minds was to clear all the junk out of the other rooms. We'd been shuffling and edging past it for months and we just wanted our space back. We took a few things up into the attic and obviously we set up the desks and the PCs the way we wanted them, but pretty much everything else got dumped in piles all over the study.

And not even logical piles. Simply the piles they'd been in during the refurb, and some of them were consolidated during the move back.

Today was the day we agreed we'd left it long enough. Those "few precious weeks" of relaxation that I referred to the day we moved back in have become seven weeks and it's time to tidy up!

We didn't finish, but in the end I was pleased with progress. All of the piles of paper have gone from the floor, as have all the boxes except those containing CDs (there's a reason they are being left behind). There's been much throwing away, a deal of sorting, and some more carrying up into the attic. The wireless printer is now in its permanent home atop the filing cabinet and we're down to a single table's worth of sorting and filing.

We both would have made more progress today had it not been for our mutual distraction with the contents of two small boxes left over from the house move. The contents of our bedside tables. Sorting through these was like a walk back through the memories of the last few years. Programmes from the Royal Exchange, tickets from concerts, birthday, Christmas, and Father's Day cards going back to when Natalie had only just learned to write her name, and several large piles of cards from Nikki, from the days when we lived apart. Still smelling faintly of her perfume (we used to spray them before sending them) and still holding their secret messages. Those two small boxes - one each - took us more than half the day to sort through, but the rediscovered memories made it time well spent and our smiles stayed with us the rest of the weekend.

How's it swinging?

After my audition last week, I wondered how long it would take Dave to make his decision. I was in Bracknell today for a morning meeting, so when I turned my phone back on afterward I'd had a message from him.

Ever the gentleman, he apologised for leaving "bad news" in a voicemail, but said he'd decided on balance to stick with a female vocalist. Can't say I was surprised after the conversations we'd had last week. It would have been a lot of work for him to transpose all those arrangements - judging from the pile of music they all carry around with them there must be over a hundred numbers in their repertoire - and as I said before there's always the glamour angle to consider.

He was gracious enough to say that if they hadn't had a female interested they would definitely have gone with me. You might think that coming second out of two is not such a great result, but I took some comfort from his words, although I really wasn't bothered either way. In fact on reflection I think it is the right result. If I'm honest I could see myself getting bored with very quickly. Swing isn't really my genre, the Friday factor would have come into play too, and it would have been wrong to put the band to all the trouble of learning new arrangements only for me to walk away after a few weeks.

Disconnected

It's nice to have friends. Friends have a lot of good qualities. They share your good times and bad, help you out in times of need, bring qualities to "the party" that complement your own, give you an alternative perspective on the world in general and today's problem in particular, turn up and trash your wireless network an hour before you have to go out to a bonfire party.

Huh?

Yes, well, you know. Shit happens. When we had the Mexican night a few weeks ago, we'd intended to seek out a Mexican radio station on Shoutcast to play some mood music when it was our leg, but we couldn't get through to the server. Casting around to test out some other connectivity, we found we couldn't reach our other PCs on the home network either, so we assumed the XBox's wireless bridge was at fault. I began to wonder whether we'd configured it when we were using WPA-PSK. I'd had to downgrade the encryption standard to WEP to allow my old laptop to connect, and thought maybe the bridge was failing to connect on account of that.

Anyway the problem became more serious when we wanted to start watching Series 2 of Heroes, so I called in the friend (names have been changed to spare embarrassment) who had initially set the bridge up to check it out. With hindsight I could just as easily have gone to the manufacturer's website and dl'd the manual myself, but ... you know ... I was feeling lazy.

So yesterday was not only the day of the bonfire party, it was the Day The Wireless Bridge Got Sorted. Only it didn't. With remarkable (I could say whirlwind) speed and staccato throwaway comments like "you shouldn't have it set up like that," and "oh, no, you don't do it that way," our fully functional wireless-network-and-Internet-access was trashed to the point where no computers could see the Internet, none could see each other, my work laptop couldn't see the bridge it was plugged directly into, and the wireless router was refusing to reset.

And all because we had two DHCP servers (one on the Internet facing DSL router and one on the wireless router). They were on different subnets, so they weren't interfering with each other, but it wasn't "right" so we had to have it changed. For some reason I never did quite fathom, we didn't get a vote about whether it was changed or not, but in simple terms the situation can be described as "our way=works fine; friend's way=nothing works at all."

So I methodically put everything back the way it was and got it working again (took me an extra couple of hours to get my work laptop back to the point where it would actually connect to work, which had me worried for a while) and spent a few minutes contemplating the relative merits of asking for "help." The irony was that the bridge had been set up just fine. The problem with Shoutcast was Shoutcast's fault, and the problem with the access to the home network was that I was using the wrong Samba sharepoint. Ho hum.

What was even more annoying...when we sat down to watch Heroes we had the same problem as last year. The wireless signal in the lounge just isn't strong enough to carry a video signal and after a few minutes we start getting lengthy pauses in the playback while the XBox does some buffering. The only recourse is to FTP the files down to the box, which meant we couldn't watch any episodes today.

Still, in the midst of all this, it's important to remember that without said friend, we wouldn't have the Heroes files in the first place, so it's all swings and roundabouts really. We all make mistakes. Live and learn. Forgive and forget. You have to laugh. Etc.

Belated Bonfire night

We were invited to a bonfire party tonight. Not sure of the protocol, but thinking that perhaps it would be polite to turn up with a few additions to the fireworks supply as well as something to drink (I've been doing BYOB for years, so why not BYOF?), I stepped into a fireworks shop for the first time in over 30 years.

I say "fireworks shop" - in reality it was the first newsagents I drove past in Chorlton that sported a fireworks sign in the window. I'd just picked Natalie up from halls and, glad of the moral support and second opinion even though she's even more inexperienced at buying bangers than I am, we crossed the road and entered the establishment with some trepidation.

Being the weekend after bonfire night I wasn't really expecting to have much choice, but on the other hand I was fairly convinced there would still be a few stragglers in the bonfire party stakes this weekend, so there was a chance some stock would remain. I needn't have worried. The shopkeeper, an extremely friendly and helpful Asian guy, pulled out a bewildering array of boxes of various sizes and covered his counter-top with them.

Bear in mind that the last time I bought fireworks, roman candles came in ones. Single tubes about the diameter of two fingers held together and anything from 10cm to 60cm long. You stuck them in the earth, or a sand bucket, "lit the blue touchpaper and retired immediately." Now, the standard seems to be the size of at least twelve such tubes, all stuck together in a cube and wrapped in a free-standing package. Not only that, but "blue touchpaper" technology - always a bit hit-and-miss at the best of times - seems to have been uniformly replaced with proper fuses, protected from damage by being separately wrapped and taped to the side of the main "bomb".

One of the largest such packages we saw was a Screaming Demon. About 18" (45cm) long and 4" (10cm) wide, this held THREE HUNDRED fireworks and, we presumed, made a lot of noise! That was an easy choice, and we selected one other box-shaped thing and a packet of four rockets. These were a revelation too. Again the rockets I'm familiar with were just like roman candles on a stick. These were more like tins of baked beans on a stick, and came with their own launching tube.

When we arrived at the party (early, owing to a mix-up on their part with the invites) I was quite gratified to see that our firework offering made up about 25% of the total display. You never know exactly how much to bring to these things, do you? Well, I don't. It's a fine line between looking cheap and looking like Guy Fawkes' distant relation, but I think we hit that line dead on. Their firework pile was heavy on the rockets too, so we'd done well to bring two "boxes" and I think our offering was gratefully accepted (I didn't see anyone else bringing any contribution to the show).

The weather held off for the most part - we interrupted the show for a short sharp shower around 8pm but it wasn't enough to put the fire out. The Screaming Demon really did scream - three hundred times - especially near the end where about a quarter of the charges went off all at once. Great fun, and bonfire toffee to boot.

Friday Five and the Swing's alive!

So I had this email the other day from the guy who sits opposite me at work. He knows I enjoy singing and had spotted a request on the company Intranet for a replacement singer to join the staff Swing Band. These guys (and the occasional gal) have been playing together for so long that the name of the band reflects a part of the city where our company no longer has offices. They must have decided it would be too confusing to change the name, or maybe they're just a bunch of nostalgia freaks.

I umm'd and ahh'd for a couple of days before applying. Swing really isn't my favourite genre (although their example tracks mentioned in the advert - Fly Me To The Moon and I've Got You Under My Skin - are familiar enough) and on top of that their rehearsals generally take place on Friday lunchtimes between 12 and 1pm - one of my favourite days for working at home.

In the end I decided there was nothing to lose by auditioning. I didn't expect anything to come of it, and when the organiser - a guy I've worked with on and off for over 25 years - called me to discuss things my expectations sunk even lower. Their regular singer, who's leaving the company, is a woman and Dave was at pains to point out that not only were all the arrangements written up for a female vocal, he would actually prefer to stick with a lady. He probably thinks it brings a touch of glamour to the party. So I was on a loser from the start really. Nevertheless being a fair bloke, he wanted to give anyone who was interested a hearing, and we arranged that I'd attend today and give it a try.

I walked in on rehearsals towards the end, as Dave had intended to ask me to sing with just him accompanying me on piano - mainly so he could transpose the key to suit my voice. However, as roughly 50% of the band were known to me, he felt moved to ask me if I'd like to try singing with them, which I agreed to. We did a few bars of Fly Me To The Moon, which went alright, and then went on to Under My Skin, which proved that I didn't know the song as well as I'd thought!

Practice over, the band packed up and left while Dave stayed behind to try a few more numbers on piano and work out my vocal range so he'd have an idea how much work would be involved in rearranging their pieces. I think the main thing that impressed him was my voice is powerful enough to be heard even over the loudest passages when the brass section is in full flow. Whether or not this will be enough to overcome his preference for the only other candidate - who just happens to be a woman - we'll have to wait to find out.

And so to the Five for this Friday:

1. Who do you owe?
Financially? The mortgage company.
Socially? Everyone whose company I enjoy.
Emotionally? Nikki. For rescuing me.

2. What do you wait for?
A time, which I hope will be before retirement age, when I can give up work. The day job that is, not the "real work" that I love doing.

3. What do you disguise?
Weeping over sad movies (yes, I'm an old softie at heart).

4. Tell us a lie:
What you see is what you get.

5. Friday fill-in:
I can't get enough of ___.
your love, I can't get enough of your love, I can't get enough of your love (Copr. Bad Company)

Pick one that looks like you

I've mentioned before in the context of things going publicly wrong the importance of following procedure, and the difficulties that arise when trying to persuade people (in general, but unskilled workers in particular) of the importance of following procedure even in the face of compelling forces operating in directions opposite to those recommended.

I was reminded of this today on hearing a news bulletin about the issue of security passes to airport workers in the US. Following 9-11 security procedures were drastically tightened and steps put in place to perform detailed background checks on anyone applying to work in areas where the safety and security of airline passengers could be compromised. You might ask why such procedures were not in place before 9-11, but (a) I don't have an answer to that and (b) if I did it would probably be too long to type in here, so I'll concentrate on the topic at hand.

The trouble is, these procedures are designed by people who have never run an airport, or tried to recruit anyone, or even tried to follow the procedures they themselves have written. When you're a low-paid supervisor, and your manager asks you why the shift hasn't been filled, it won't cut any ice to say "because I'm waiting for the background checks to be done on these five candidates."

So I wasn't surprised (although more than a little disturbed) to hear that new recruits to the ground staff at Chicago's O'Hare airport are shown a box full of old security passes belonging to previous employees and told "pick one that looks like you."

Return to the Great Orme Lighthouse

Another "mates' weekend" this weekend, and a return visit to the Lighthouse on the Great Orme where we spend such a fabulous three days last year. This year the return visit included our fourth couple who were unable to make it last year, so the gang was complete and a thoroughly fab time was had by all.

Read the full story on my travelogue page.

Friday Five

We're off to the lighthouse on the Great Orme again this afternoon for another long weekend - a reprise of last year's trip. So it's an early Friday Five this week and then a break in transmission until at least Sunday!

1. What is sweet?
When someone pays you a compliment unexpectedly.

2. What hours do you work?
Irregular. If I'm in the office I usually get in around 8.45 and leave around 4.45 in time to pick Nikki up. Then I may have extra stuff to do in the evening. If I'm travelling to meetings then it's not unusual for me to have to leave the house at 4.45am to catch the 5.20 train, and not get back until after 9pm. I try to avoid working weekends though (and am almost always successful!)

3. When do you relax?
The question implies I'm not relaxed when I'm working, which isn't always true. It also implies a lack of activity, which only ever happens when I'm watching TV or sleeping. I "relax" by doing something I enjoy doing, rather than doing something I have to do. So I'm usually "on the go" with something - writing, marking, researching, housework (cooking, washing up, the usual stuff), decorating, planning, etc, but I rarely feel like I don't have "time to relax."

4. How did you learn about the birds and the bees?
I found a Ladybird book on the bookshelf in a junior school classroom when I was 9 that covered the essentials in a kind of "Janet & John" way. A couple of years later I subscribed to a magazine on human biology that went into much greater detail. Then when I was 17 I found a tutor ;o)

5. Friday fill-in:
The good vibes flow ____.
between Friday at 5pm and Sunday shortly after bedtime.

Book Review: Slaughterhouse 5

This month’s book for Chorlton Chapters is one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works. I finished it in two sessions (mainly), the second being on the train down to London last Thursday. That second session being about two-thirds of the book, it lasted the whole two-and-a-half hour journey. I literally read the last paragraph just after the train had stopped at Euston.

We chose this book for October based on the fact that it was the third time it had been selected for the vote, and it seemed (to me at least) that the damn’ thing would keep being brought back until we accepted it. And personally, having heard the title bandied about for years, I wanted to read it. I was intrigued.

I hated it. I don’t remember reading any of Vonnegut’s other work, but I must have come across him before even if only in short story form. This, I hated. From the irritating mantra “so it goes” every time anyone, or anything, is killed or dies, to the idiosyncratic, almost stream-of-consciousness prose of the narrator, to the minutiae of the boring life of Billy Pilgrim, I really could not see what all the fuss is about. And there is fuss, believe me. Read the glowing reviews on Amazon, or find study notes for the book that wibble on about Vonnegut's genius. One American college teacher states: "It is part of Vonnegut's genius that he is able to both poke fun at our mortality (I cannot recall how many times 'so it goes' is used, but it's so frequent that it becomes darkly funny) but also to remind us of, sadly, of what 'blips' we all are on this planet."

Well, thanks, but personally I didn't need to be reminded of that, and far from finding it "darkly funny" it struck me as predictable and annoying. Maybe I'm the only one out of step here, but it seems to me there's an element of the Emperor's new clothes about this novel - everyone agrees with everyone else what a work of genius it is, when really it's nothing of the kind.

I think it probably suffers from being a book of its time. Maybe back then the themes were fresh and new (although I doubt it – it was first published (in the UK) in 1970 by which time the other masters: Asimov; Heinlein; Bradbury; Clarke; Niven; Herbert … were all well into their stride) but now the writing seems amateurish and feeble. The themes of alien abduction, temporal dislocation, social dysfunction, have all been done before, or since, better. As a historical record of the privations of life in a prison camp, or the bombing of Dresden, the details are too sketchy to satisfy and the plot too thin to hold the attention. Did I say plot? The book reads like a French film – meandering along observing the actions and reactions of Pilgrim without a goal in sight and then ends with as big a whimper as it began.

Score up another one in the “I wouldn’t have read this unless I had to” category. Nothing in the synopsis, the flyleaf, or the first few pages would have induced me to pick up this bollocks unless I’d had the incentive of the book club, and even then I resent the fact that I could have more profitably used the time spent reading it.

The Foodie Weekend

It's no wonder I can never lose any weight when we have days like this!

Yesterday was the Northwest Fine Foods Festival at Tatton Park and after a general tidy round so the house was in a decent state for later(see below) we set off for Tatton around 12.30. Unlike Blenheim, this event was housed in a single massive marquee, which we were grateful for as it was threatening rain when we arrived and followed through on the threat with a fine drizzle as we were leaving. In between we stayed (relatively) warm and dry and comprehensively boggled by the array of foods and drink on display.

As we meandered a figure-of-eight around the islands of stalls we passed a wonderful variety cheeses, pickled garlic, massive pickled olives, handmade chocolates (some of the most original shown here on the right), original liqueurs, sloe/ blackberry/ raspberry gin/vodka, cakes, Christmas cake, the lightest Christmas pudding I've ever tasted (virtually every stall offered samples), hand-reared pork, beef and goat (yuk! the only thing I tasted all day that I didn't like), organic vegetables by the trug-load, sweets, licorice, and many more delights to satisfy the most selective gourmet palate.

I was surprised, when we left, to find we'd spent less than two hours there, but it was two hours packed with ever more amazed expressions of delight as taste after taste exploded on our tongues. We were loaded down with bags containing small samples (my favourite of which was the highland whisky and orange liqueur) and with stomachs that, although they'd only enjoyed small samples at each stall were nevertheless strangely full!


Back home we had just enough time for everyone to shower and change before we set off on the first leg of the Mexican night organised by our neighbours on the street. The starting point was the house around the corner whose garden backs on to ours. Over the years by virtue of having held over-the-fence conversations with many of the neighbours on our side of the road they've become "honorary members" of the street scene. Here we enjoyed tequila shots and dips before moving on back around the corner to the first of the street stops where our neighbours had prepared fritatas with marinated shrimps and Mexican wine.

Next stop was our place. In her inimitable way, Nikki had researched some fabulous Mexican food online and cooked up a brilliant Mexican vegetable pasta bake together with a seven-layer dip, while I did the honours making Tequila sunrises for everyone (or San Miguel for those of a non-cocktail bent). We'd worked out we needed to stick to a schedule of around 45 minutes per house to get around everybody, but as the tequila, beer and wine flowed the schedule gradually slipped unnoticed out of the window.

Then it was on to number 19 where the boys had prepared some delicious enchiladas (both meat and non-meat varieties) and pitchers of Caipirinha (strictly speaking a Brazilian drink, but at least they were on the right continent!).

Across the road next and as we were becoming somewhat stuffed by this time we were grateful that only small portions of a delicious spicy Mexican rice dish were on offer here, together with more beer and wine. Finally we ended up at the house directly opposite us, site of the famous summer street party and where the Mexican drink theme landed on familiar territory with Margaritas (even if our hostess did have a rather unique way of making them - chuck whole limes in a blender and bung in a bottle of tequila. The result, although somewhat lumpy with chunks of pith, was extremely limey!) and large bowls of fruit salad.

At this point the hectic pace of the evening slowed down. We watched a DVD of the summer barbeque, chatted, drank some more, and finally came home around 2.30am which, with the benefit of the changing clocks, suddenly became 1.30!

Friday Five

It was one of those days yesterday.

Despite very creatively steering my afternoon meeting to the point where, 45 minutes in, we had only one agenda item left, and thinking therefore, perfectly reasonably in my view, that with an hour to go we could realistically hope to get away at 3pm, rather than 4pm as the room booking and original scheduled meeting time would suppose, I had reckoned without the determination of my fellow attendees. Determined, they were, to spin the meeting out to its allotted time. Indeed even that was not sufficient as we hung back at the end of the meeting continuing a debate that I'd been trying to shut down for half an hour.

The end result was that I had to catch the 5.05 and arrived in Manchester mere minutes too late to put up the posters on my way home, before the play started. I had to wait an hour until the interval and then make a special trip over there. Pah!

That wasn't the worst though. On the train journey home I sat across the aisle from an older guy (looked to be in his early sixties) and a younger woman (mid thirties?) who’d clearly been on a business trip for the day. For the first hour and a half of the journey, while he was regaling her with tales of family holidays and whatnot she sat turned towards him in rapt attention going “yeah…yeah…yeah” constantly (I mean at the rate of one yeah every 5-10 seconds), interspersed with nervous forced giggles. I tell you, it did my head in. What he was telling her sounded about as funny as boils, so God knows what the hell she was laughing at, and why she found it necessary to keep up the constant stream of “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” after literally every fourth or fifth word the guy spoke. Did someone tell her it’s what good listeners do? Does she realise it makes her sound like some kind of vacuous bovine moron? God.


And so to the business at hand...

1. What makes you feel exposed?
Being asked a question that I'm "supposed" to know the answer to, or to provide an explanation for something I should understand, but which I haven't been keeping tabs on and therefore don't know/understand. Years ago the threat of being in that situation would have spurred me on to read more, learn more, do more. But it's a growing problem as my increasing lack of enthusiasm for my job and it's massively expanded scope and complexity have conspired to rob me of any chance of keeping up.

2. What do you have to force yourself to do?
Get up on a cold morning. Do the household budgeting. Tidy up. Gardening (although I usually enjoy that once I get started).

3. Where do you like to spend your time outdoors?
Anywhere by the sea, or where there are trees.

4. What surprises you?
How stupid people can be.
How wonderful people can be.

5. Friday fill-in:
Late at night I'm ____.
Assembling Chorlton Players photographs into posters! (This week only lol)

While The Lights Were Out

Regular readers will know I’m the resident photographer for the Chorlton Players. You can see some examples of my work here (they're not all mine). I turn up to all the dress rehearsals (or at least, as many as work allows – and I do try to manage my calendar to avoid disappointment) and spend the evening between 7.30pm and ~11pm snapping happily away from the floor of the hall, walking to and fro to get various angles on the stage, sometimes taking extreme close-ups, sometimes shots of the whole stage, sometimes with flash, sometimes without.

Generally I prefer not to use the flash. The colours are more natural and there’s no red-eye problem. But many of the plays involve lots of movement and subdued lighting, which leads to a high percentage of wasted shots, blurred from the actors’ sudden movements or out of focus because the dim light combined with use of maximum zoom has defeated the autofocus. The “waste” isn’t a problem of course: it’s a digital camera. It just means time wasted taking shots I can’t use, plus more time lost filtering through the pics back at home, throwing them in the recycle bin.

So usually I have to resort to flash. It’s a swings-and-roundabouts situation though; the close-ups inevitably mean more time spent fixing the red eyes once I get home.

For once last night’s dress, for the latest production While The Lights Were Out, had almost no problems with sudden movement. A traditional whodunit farce-type-thing in the style of Agatha Christie (although actually written by Jack Sharkey), the play has a single set where all three acts take place. This meant I ran the risk of the pics being a little samey and meant I had to keep changing my viewpoint to maximise the variety. The play involves a lot of standing around while the cast engage in vast amounts of exposition about what happened and why. The result was that although I took my usual 300+ shots in total, there were far fewer that needed throwing away (after the first pass I was left with 280 usable shots) and many more that fell into the “best” category (after the second pass I had 144 in my “Best” folder compared to an average of 50 for other productions).

After doing all the post-processing of the pics and then assembling some of the very best shots into my traditional six A4 posters for the hall doors, it was 2:15am. Time to grab 4 hours sleep before jumping the 7:15 to Euston in the morning.

Attention please!

It never fails to amaze me how unobservant people are. Mostly this occurs to me as they're hovering in front of me in the supermarket, looking this way and that completely oblivious to the fact that I'm behind them and would like to get past, as would 1,700 other people.

The best one though, is when I go to London and travel in one of the many lifts in the building I visit most often.

The number of the current floor is, as it quite usual, displayed on a fetching blue digital panel in the lift.

On arrival at the fourth floor, as well as displaying the number 4 inside the lift, a voice declares loudly "fourth floor."

The doors open and there, on the wall, is a large sign consisting mainly of the number 4.

And almost as sure as night follows day there'll be a passenger who turns to you and asks: "Is this the fourth floor?"

Give me strength.

A road less travelled

If you knew what I was about to tell you, and you knew what it meant, you’d be sitting down in preparation for the shock. The bridge at J7 of the M56 is being mended.

Doesn’t sound like much does it? But this bridge has been a designated “weak bridge” for the whole of living memory, or so it seems. In fact I’ll have to do some Internet research on it(*), because I simply can’t remember when it was first covered in cones, or subject to some sort of weight restriction. Let me put it this way, I’ve been assigned to my current “project” since November 2001 and the bridge has certainly been restricted to a single lane for the whole of that time. Prior to that in reverse chronological order it has been variously coned off to close the left-hand lane; coned off to close the right-hand lane; painted with cross-hatching to ensure traffic only travelled a single track along the centre of the bridge; had warning signs in place; and at various times for varying lengths of time it’s been closed altogether while the engineers do structural tests, measuring and monitoring.

I reckon it must be at least ten years.

When I drove to Solihull last Friday, men were hard at work and had dug up half the width of the bridge down to the main framework. At last! What the flippin’ ’eck has taken so long?

(*)Hmph! Nothing interesting at all apart from some Lymm residents moaning in 2005. It's been going on a lot longer than that.