Another family heirloom bites the dust

It's almost eighteen months since I first "got serious" about shifting our old tat through the auspices of eBay. A few months less than that since I blogged about it. In that year and a half I've sold things from as small as an enamel lapel badge to as large as an entire bedroom suite comprising super-king sleigh bed (with mattress), triple wardrobe, five-drawer chest and two three-drawer bedside tables. That went to a hotel owner in Staffordshire who, in the end, was glad I'd persuaded him to come in a Luton van. He admitted he would never have got it all on the trailer he had been intending to come with.

Some of the items I've been glad to see the back of. Some of the really bad DVDs we've bought over the years, and many of the things mentioned on that blog post linked above. Things that have hung around for years not being used and never likely to be.

Some things I've had to let go with a twinge of regret. Mostly stuff that has been part of my life since childhood, but which I had to reluctantly conclude there was absolutely no point hanging on to. The Kodascope Eight Model 30 vintage cine projector that the whole family used to gather around to watch holiday footage, interspersed with reels from my Dad's small collection of B&W Felix the Cat cartoons. When I opened up its old wooden box and that familiar smell hit me, all the memories came flooding back. But hey, I don't need the object to have the memories, and it went to someone who will actually use it.

Similarly with my Mum's old Singer sewing machine. Not something I had any emotional attachment to ;0) but I was delighted that it went to a guy in the Netherlands who refurbishes them and passes them on to retired ladies who are keen on quilting. Once again something that had sat unused under Mum's sideboard for 25 years gets a new lease of life.

And since I've arrived through a roundabout route at the sideboard, it's time to reveal that it is that very sideboard, along with its matching dining table and four chairs, that is the subject of this post. For it too was sold, this weekend just past.

Solid walnut. Yes, solid, not veneer as suggested by the plonker from an auction house who came round to value it and tried to make out it was veneered because he could see a join in the top. Idiot. That's where the wood itself is jointed by the craftsmen whose workshop I visited, aged 13 or 14, to see the dining room suite being made. It was my Dad's gift for attaining his majority - 21 years with the same firm.

Walnut's not "in vogue" at the moment though, and the whole thing was both too small for our needs and too small for the room it would live in, not to mention having suffered from various forms of neglect over the years. It would take an expert, an expensive expert, to return the suite to the soft matte patina with which it originally arrived from the makers. It lived 40 years in clouds of cigarette smoke, was polished with the wrong kind of polish, suffered water damage when someone attempted to wash off the smoke residue (and left a tea-tray sitting on a damp patch), and was constantly exposed to sunlight and curtain movement on one corner, so all in all it was in a pretty sorry state.

And we don't like the style much either. Offspring never do like the style of their parents, do they? I'm no exception. So it joined the ranks of eBay sales. 228 of them since May 2011. Unfortunately we were just half an hour too late returning from our Sunday lunch with friends to arrange a pick up for that day, so we have to hang on to it for another two weeks, which in turn means our flooring guy will have to work around it.

100TWC - Day 99: Friendship

This post has a lot of tags. It started off with more but I blew Blogger's limit. I didn't even know there was a limit! See, friendship touches so many areas of my life that Blogger can't cope. I'm half expecting it to seize up in the middle of this post. Let's see how we get on...

With the last post of my 100-day (aka 100-theme) writing challenge in sight, friendship has been much on my mind. I've had some really nice comments and feedback on here, but what's been even better, and more surprising, is the feedback I've had in real life. Whenever I've met up with friends at least one of them has commented on each occasion how much they've been enjoying the writing. I've been enjoying it too, of course, in fact that's one of the things I'll be including in the "lessons learned" follow-up post I'll be writing over the weekend. But it's one thing to gain enjoyment from something yourself, and totally another thing to find out that you've been giving enjoyment to others. Writing can be a solitary experience (all writers say this, at least those who speak/write/email to me) with -- often -- not much in the way of validation or appreciation, so it's really cool to hear the opinions of readers, which posts they liked best and why, etc.

I'd also be really interested to hear which ones folk thought didn't work out so well. To see how this matches my own feelings, for one thing, but also because it's all part of the learning experience. Just doing this stuff has helped me improve enormously, but really good feedback that mentions the bad as well as the good, is also a huge help.

I appear to have drifted off topic somewhat, so to drag it back to friendship: I've been lucky. When I talk about the times we have with mates -- the trips to the Lakes, weekends away, meals out (and in) -- the single most common response is how unusual it is for a bunch of guys to have kept a communal friendship going for so long. I'm not sure how rare it is in the great scheme of things, but those who comment on it seem to think it's pretty rare. Much more common for women to have a "girly group of friends"; less so for guys to have a "blokey group", apparently.

I've known for many years that social groups depend on key individuals to hold them together. I had an old colleagues network at one time -- around two dozen people who all used to work together in the same part of the organisation until one dark day a reorganisation came along and scattered us all across the company. Some left for other jobs, some took the opportunity for early retirement, most split up into three or four units, separated by geography, department and skill set. For several years after the split, we would get together two or three times a year (Christmas, obviously, and then one or two other meals or social events like bowling, walking, pub crawls). These were all marvellous events, well attended and very popular, but they all had a single individual -- the same guy in every case -- as the instigator. And then one day he stopped doing it. And none of us have ever met up again since that day.

The small group of friends I always refer to as my "Nottingham" mates (even though only two of them live there now) have strength in depth when it comes to organising get-togethers. It's not driven by just one of us. Once a few weeks, or a months, have gone by since our last meet, one or other of us will get in touch to set something else up. Often we don't need to do this, as we arrange it in advance at the previous one. It's a source of infinite variety, pleasure, amusement and fun to Nikki and I to be able to be part of this, as I'm sure anyone who is lucky enough to have their own strong ties of friendship will understand. Friends, they say, are the family you choose, and I would tag that with "lines I wish I'd written" if there was any space left in the tag list :0)

As I've discovered (and blogged about before), friends come at you from all parts of life, and another group that I've been blessed to reconnect with -- a few years back now -- has been the curry crew. We may only meet once a month, but I find myself looking forward to those evenings immensely. The conversation always flows, it's always stimulating and amusing, and the food is only the icing on the cake (if curry can be said to be any kind of icing).

I have a small number of friends that fall into another different category. All of the aforementioned might be classed as "regular" friends, and if such a term fits then this small number I'm talking about now might correspondingly be referred to as "irregular" friends. People who, over the years, have meandered in and out of my life seemingly at random, but who whenever we meet will pick up the threads of friendship (and even conversation!) and knit them back into something recognisable within a few hours. I met one such person outside a hotel once, a few years back. Having not seen him for more than five years, suddenly there he was, leaving a hotel at which I had arrived to meet someone else. We only had chance for twenty minutes frantic catching up and exchanging of current contact details, but it rekindled some long-buried memories and the spark of yet another friendship stretching back to the mid 1970s. We originally met at university and the names of other uni friends crop up regularly in the strangest places. Naturally the Internet is the perfect medium for this and over the years I've had the occasional email from old friends who've read this blog, or seen my profile on LinkedIn, or Friends Reunited, or found my website through Google.

There is a downside to this though. The reality of how easy it is to lose touch with people was brought home to me when I attended a school reunion about 15 years ago. It was such a strange experience I vowed never to attend one again (although I was tempted a couple of years back when they held a 25th -- or was it 30th? -- reunion). Not only the experience -- spending 3 or 4 hours in a function room with 50 people who at one time I saw on a daily basis but who, with one exception, I hadn't seen for 15 years -- but the aftermath. The impact of the realisation that I had completely lost touch with all of them, even those I'd thought of as close friends, really hit me surprisingly hard. I guess it just shows that friends are more than simply people you spend time with. Just as it's easy to be lonely in a crowded room, rubbing shoulders with a bunch of people every day for six years doesn't necessarily make them your friends. It knocked me for six a bit, did that.

100TWC - Day 64: Frost

Around this time of year as a boy, or maybe just a week or two later, I used to expect that on really cold days I'd wake up to frost on my bedroom windows. On the inside. Double glazing and central heating were unknown concepts to me growing up. My bedroom windows (there were two, one on each outside wall, which made my room probably the coldest room in the house and certainly the coldest bedroom. Even the bathroom, which also had two exterior walls, only had one window) were single-glazed, with metal frames, and hence particularly susceptible to the cold.

Interestingly (it has just occurred to me) when we sold that house in April of this year, those single glazed metal framed windows -- the original ones with which the house was built in the 1940s -- were still in place, still intact. I've no doubt they will have been replaced now, but they lasted almost 70 years.

My parents only got around to investing in central heating after I moved out. And even then, because they "didn't like hot bedrooms", the system they installed was only partial. A radiator beside the boiler in the kitchen, which I always thought was completely redundant since the boiler, being a 1970s vintage, was not particularly well insulated. One at the bottom of the stairs to warm the hall. One at the top to service the landing. If you wanted any heat in a bedroom you had to leave the door open. And that was it. Three single, narrow radiators for an entire 3-bedroom semi-detached house. The "through" lounge/ dining room had a gas fire.

But such luxury was unknown to me as a child. The only source of heat in my room was a two-bar portable electric fire. It smelt, when on, in that way old metal electric fires have. Especially the first time it was used each year in the run-up to Christmas. Having been gathering dust for something approaching nine months, the first time you switched it on all that dust would burn off the element and stink the room out for days. It wasn't just dust, of course. There would be the odd dead fly in there too. And possibly a few strands of hair that had found their way through the grille. I hated that fire, ugly brown dumpy little monstrosity that it was, but it didn't stop me from turning it on every night an hour or so before I went to bed.

No such luxury in the mornings, of course. Time switches were another technology denied to us in the 1960s and early 70s. Hence the frost on the windows. I could see my breath most mornings too, in that room. It's a wonder I ever plucked up the courage to get out of bed, especially once my folks had gone all modern and replaced our traditional bedding with those new-fangled "continental quilts" (duvets, to modern readers). Toasty warm it was, under my "quilt", and hence by comparison, even colder in the bedroom.

On school mornings it was a mad dash to the bathroom, once my Dad had whistled his signal that he'd finished at the washbasin. The bathroom had one of those ceiling lights with a heater in it, and on really cold mornings Dad would have turned it on when he first got up. So the bathroom (again, by comparison) was warmer than the bedroom. Warmer even than the landing which, being in the middle of the house, never got as cold as the outer rooms.

On weekend mornings I didn't need to be quite so brave. I could laze around in bed until the sun was up, and melted the frost on the windows. At least then it didn't look as cold in my room.

When I got a bit older, I found myself wondering exactly how cold it got in that room. I'd acquired a thermometer from somewhere and I hung it on the wall. Being of an analytical bent (OK, OK, I was a spod. I admit it), it was not enough for me to just glance at the reading every morning and evening on my way out of, and into bed. I had to write the temperatures down. And then, having written them down, I had to graph them up. And so it was that, by the age of 15, I had a year's worth of bedroom temperature readings on a graph on my wall, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the coldest it ever got in my room one winter's morning, was 44°F.

I saw my breath THAT morning, I can tell you!

The graph spiked a lot where the electric fire was on in the evening, and not in the morning, but the trend of temperatures was still visible, as were the maxima and minima. Attentive readers will have noticed that even this glaring evidence of incipient frostbite in my room was not enough to persuade my parents that central heating was necessary, until after I'd moved out. Whether or not this constitutes child abuse I will leave it up to the reader to decide.

The frost on the inside of my windows did make exceedingly pretty patterns though. Which was, naturally, some small compensation for the discomfort.

100TWC - Day 58: Heartfelt Apology

This is a hard one. Hard to write, almost certainly hard to read. Hard to even think about. Because there's an apology - a heartfelt apology - that I have needed to make for a long time, and I can never make it.

Do you think about it much? I bet you do. In those quiet moments, perhaps, before you go to sleep. Or if you're feeling down for any reason. Or sometimes does it hit you at the most surprising times, when everything is sunshine and warmth and happiness. And then you remember with a sudden jolt and a lump in the throat. I do.

But for me -- and I know this isn't about me, but this is how I still feel about it; the only way I can express it -- for me the worst times are whenever I see or hear stories of abandonment. Of children left behind. They always make me cry. I'm crying now, thinking about it. Writing about it. There are some scenes, in some movies, that I simply cannot watch.

Even now, with the perspective of all these years, it's still there. Like a stain on my soul. One that I can never scrub off no matter what I do to repair that old wound. It bears a scar, you see. I knew it would. I talked it over and over with people who had been through it. Talking about it like that was, partly, just a way of postponing the inevitable, but it was also a way of validating the hard decision. I needed to be certain that, of all the bad choices I could make, the one I ended up with was the least bad for the most number of people. Which is why it took me so long to go. Even though I knew for a long time I had to, I couldn't bring myself to do it for years. Because I would always, always rather hurt myself than hurt you.

In the end though, I knew there was nothing else for it. I had to do it. Because staying, in the long term, would have caused more hurt than going. I tried to explain, even though I knew I never would be able to. Even though I knew the message would be garbled, and infected with lies and half-truths by those more interested in serving their own agenda. You couldn't possibly have understood, back then. And knowing that you understand now, now that you're all grown up and out there, doing your own things and living your own lives and, no doubt, making your own mistakes the way all of us do. Stumbling around in the dark looking for the way forward. Now I know you understand, it helps. A little. But you didn't understand at the time. You were bewildered, frightened, angry, and lost.

And that's the hurt I can never mend, no matter how many times I apologise. I can't go back there and be there for you, help you through it the way I always had up to that point. The way I started to again, much later. So this isn't only an apology to you today, though you surely deserve one. It is also -- or even mainly, perhaps -- an apology to the 11-year-old you, and the 6-year-old you. The frightened, tearful girls I left behind who grew up, in spite of all the pain and loss, to be the most wonderful, talented, beautiful daughters a man could ever dream of. Love you.

100TWC - Day 35: Forgotten

The memories of those warm summer days were all that was left to it now. Day trips to the river with the man and his son. Sunlight flashing and sparkling on the slow-moving water. Early morning mist and the distant muted sound of weekend traffic on the bridge, making its way into the city. Back then the phrase "retail therapy" hadn't been invented, but that's what they would call it now.

It felt useful, on those days. The man's work-roughened hands were warm and strong as he fitted it into place. Into its well-worn groove. It liked that. Being in the groove. It sounded modern. Which for an antique piece was an exciting thing. Slotting into the groove had been part of its experience for countless years. It had belonged to the man's father. And before that, to his father. During those most recently remembered summer mornings by the river, there was no hint that the family tradition wouldn't be continued with the son. The boy who accompanied them on these frequent trips to the water's edge and sat disconsolately munching on a chocolate bar to keep him from fidgeting and disturbing the prey.

On such working days, there would be time to think. Out in the fresh air, tainted with the damp green smell of the river, the faint oily scent of the traffic fumes from the bridge, there were long periods of inactivity. Of gentle contemplation and relaxation. Occasionally there would be conversation between the man and his son. Quiet words, so as not to scare off the timid prey, but deep too. The kind of subject matter that a father would share with his son. The wisdom of ages. The reminiscences. The juvenile, innocent questions. A bonding experience it felt privileged to be a part of, even if only a supporting role.

Then, on good days, there would occasionally be a burst of excited activity when the prey took the bait and its full abilities would be tested to their limits as the battle raged, sometimes short, others long, until the prey was secured and the bait cast out again.

Distant memories, long gone. Now it occupied a lonely corner of a window sill in the old shed. The sill too high to catch sight of anything outside. Gardening activities had stopped soon after the outings to the river, and the shed was rarely opened up any more. Whole seasons, entire years went by with no visitors except the woodworm that rasped at its dull mahogany surface and the spiders who covered it in gossamer.

Soon, even the spiders left. Died out through lack of food in the closed-up shed, or left to seek their fortunes in more well-stocked larders. Their ancient cobwebs slowly gathered dust, hiding it further from sight, and from memory, one mote at a time. Its handsome varnish had long been worn away by the hands of erstwhile owners, and the exposed woodwork decayed gradually under the influence of the damp air of the shed. Brass ferrules and chasings had long lost their shine and become tarnished and pitted.

The shed door opened. A remembered voice disturbed its reverie.

"God. All this too."
"Ugh! I can't go in there. Too spidery. What's that round thing on the sill?"
"What, this?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, wow! My Dad's old reel! Haven't seen this for years."

100TWC - Day 20: My Inspiration

For a long time I thought I got my inspiration from others.

When you work in the kind of high-tech, leading edge company that I did back in the 80s and early 90s (it's still the same company now, but I no longer think of it as leading edge. Even though it is still in the business of high tech), you become so familiar with being surrounded by people of enormous intellect that it's easy to feel almost less than normal. Or at least, below average.

Over the years I've heard anecdotes from ex-colleagues who left. They all shared a theme: no-one within the company really knows how good they are until, voluntarily or otherwise, they step outside it. Only when given the chance to compare oneself with regular people outside can one begin to appreciate the amazing talent that exists inside.

Without wishing to blow my own trumpet overmuch, it's true that in all the 34 years I've been there I have never been asked to do something that I couldn't, eventually, succeed at. And before the cynics among you start, I have been asked to do some pretty off-the-wall, technically challenging stuff. But even allowing for the fact that the staff in general were above average for "the marketplace" there were still some particular outstanding individuals that I looked up to, wanted to emulate, and who I thought of as a source of inspiration.

Outside the workplace, in common with a lot of people (at least those who don't allow their work life to grow so that it consumes their entire life) I got busy with private endeavours. More artistic endeavours. Here too I was lucky to meet people who I looked to for inspiration.

But in thinking of how I would approach this theme, it came to me that these people, almost to a man person, did not inspire me. I was confusing inspiration with aspiration. I aspired to emulate them in some way, either to be as clever, as resourceful, as knowledgeable, as inventive, as dedicated, whatever. But my inspiration - my source of ideas, or commitment - was not them.

It was me.

When I seek an idea for a story, or a poem, or a song, I don't go to people I respect or admire. I sit quietly, possibly listening to music (yes, also possibly, just possibly, playing Spider Solitaire) and I run ideas through my head. Or, more often, I wait for them to come to me. I open myself up to what ancient scholars would have called my Muse. And I've learned, more so in the last few years than at any time in my life, to trust it. If I let my mind free wheel, ideas come. It might only be a line of dialogue or it might be an entire conversation. My memory is so poor, and the ideas often so fleeting, that I have to write them down as quickly as I can. The trick there is not to start writing too soon. To let the idea ripen and develop until it feels "done." You could liken it to letting dough "prove" before baking. Only then can I write it down without losing it, and so that I don't lose it. Getting the timing of that right is quite a delicate balance, and I still miss regularly (mostly on the side of waiting too long and forgetting the important bits, unfortunately).

Of course when it's a song I'm writing I have the source of inspiration right there on my computer. The music. I can just let it play over and over on repeat until the words begin to suggest themselves. I've often referred to this as "letting the music tell me its story," and that's exactly how it feels.

The example I most commonly use to explain how this inspiration works when at its best, is the time I wrote Tumbleweed (one of the poems in my first collection - Well of Love - which is linked in the sidebar). It was a quiet weekend afternoon and I simply sat at my keyboard, opened up my mind and started writing. To my astonishment the words poured onto the screen, my thoughts flying so fast I could hardly type quickly enough to keep up with them. So fast, indeed, that I was hardly conscious of what they were saying. It was an exhilarating experience. At the end of that brief period of frantic typing I had well over 90% of a completed poem. The only missing parts were where I had felt my mind groping for a word or a phrase that was missing from the stream of consciousness I was recording. When that happened - only three or four places in what is quite a long poem - I simply skipped over the word or line, leaving a dash to mark the place.

Going back over the piece and replacing the dashes with real content was a matter of only half an hour or so. The words were there, it just felt as though they had somehow "got stuck" in the frenzied flow.

I can't explain it and it's probably silly to try. It has only happened once since, although on that occasion it was a deliberate experiment to see if I could repeat the experience - this time with a song rather than a poem. Contrarily perhaps, the fact that it worked a second time has made me reluctant to try again until and unless I reach a point in my writing where I absolutely need it. It's like a pure wellspring that I don't want to drink from too often for fear of tainting it. That probably sounds crazy, but

100TWC - Day 10: Opportunities

Opportunity is a master of disguise. Sometimes it is so good that you don't see it at all. At other times you might see it, but believe it to be a threat, to be avoided at all costs. Often its disguise is polarised so that from the present it doesn't look anything like an opportunity but once you've sailed past it and are looking at it from the future (so that the opportunity is in the past) you can see that it really was an opportunity after all.

Many years ago my father was offered a dream job in another city. I was around 9 at the time and I remember my parents going for a long walk to discuss whether or not he should take it. Because I had no alternative child care they took me along with them. I didn't understand much of the conversation and in any case a lot of it was spoken in hushed voices, but I heard enough to know that if the decision went in favour of this new job it would involve moving. At that age, it was an uncomfortable prospect for me. I've never really been one to embrace change wholeheartedly. My instinct is more usually to avoid it in case it turns out badly rather than welcome it on the chance that it will be great. I'm like that now, with all my adult armour and skills. At age 9 I was just a bundle of no.

As the conversation came to a conclusion I remember them asking my opinion. It's only really come home to me now, at this point of writing about it and with both of them now dead, what a wonderful gesture that was. To give a 9-year-old a vote on such a momentous family decision. I do hope my opinion wasn't the only thing that swayed them because I voted no, and the decision in the end was no, so my father continued in his unsatisfying job working for a boss who rarely showed his appreciation for the diamond he had working for him.

For years my recollection of this incident was that the city in question was Birmingham. However in conversation with my Mum many years ago it turned out I had misremembered. The opportunity was to move to Manchester. Thinking about that now still gives me a small tingle. How I - effectively - turned down the chance to move to Manchester at age 9, but that fate had very definitely inked Manchester into my future and was determined to get me here one way or another. I didn't get the grades I needed for my first choice of University course, but the college who had the best offer of an alternative place was in... Manchester. So I moved here anyway when I was 18, and moved back again permanently when I was 44. What would have been different had I come when I first had the chance? Who knows. That's the thing with opportunity: it's often a one-time, one-way offer.

In 1984 or 85, when I was enjoying one of the most successful points of my career - responsible for 19 people all engaged in the world-wide 3rd line support of what was widely regarded as one of the best (if not the best) operating systems in the world - I was offered a job working as a full-time contracted employee for a major government department, doing a similar role but with a much larger team, and on "the other side of the fence" - working for a customer. The job would have entailed moving to Lytham St Annes (or commuting from Staffordshire - not THAT much of a stretch). Once again my aversion to change kicked in. I'd just bought a house that I was very pleased with, felt on top of my game in my job - I knew everyone; how to get the job done quickly and efficiently; I was good at it and yet it still challenged me daily - so as far as I could see the only incentive to move was the offer of more money.

That wasn't enough to persuade me. I turned them down.

A colleague of mine, who ran the support team for a different part of the OS, took up the offer in my stead. Months later it was reported that she had been spotted as a rising star and had quickly been promoted into a much more senior role with an even more advanced salary. Moreover she was working 14 hour days, 6 days a week, and even at that senior level the job still paid overtime. We huddled round our calculators and worked out that she must have been pulling in around a quarter of a million pounds a year - back in 1985!!

I think it would be true to say she made the most of her opportunity. I think it may also be true to say she made the most of MY opportunity. Would I have been able to follow it up to the same degree? Who knows. We had similar skills, but if I'm honest where we differed was in outlook. I've never been driven by money (even though I've been fortunate to only rarely be "short" of it), but I don't think I'd have been prepared to put in those kind of hours no matter what the remuneration.

So in conclusion - opportunities come and go. Sometimes - as in the example of moving to Manchester - they will revisit you at a later date, wearing a different disguise. But in the same way that opportunities can appear to be threats, their dark siblings threats are also able to dress themselves up as opportunities. Knowing how to tell them apart is a clever trick that no-one can pull off 100% of the time. But while you're trying desperately to avoid jumping from the frying pan into the fire, it's worth bearing in mind that what looks like a fire may in fact be the magic alchemist's forge that can transform you from base metal into gold.

Happy Birthday!

It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.

One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.

The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.

Shirley Margaret Fletcher

I've been thinking (worrying) about this post since before we flew to Toronto. Knowing I should write something, knowing that it would be hard. That it could be upsetting, both to write and to read. The best I can do - ALL I can do - is to relate how she appeared to me. I knew her for a little over ten years. We first met in 2000 when I visited Toronto. Meeting your partner's parents for the first time is never easy, no matter how old and experienced you are. But in this case the circumstances were perhaps even less auspicious than normal, there being the unspoken possibility that I would be spiriting her daughter off to live with me in England. It came back to me later that Shirley had said something like "I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't. He's such a nice guy."

So the first thing I learned about Shirley was that she was a very astute judge of character ;o)

Some people are an open book, others more guarded. Shirley could appear quite abrasive, but if I were to continue with the book analogy I'd say she was like a book that was bound in cactus, but turned out to be a heartwarming story of infinite warmth and humanity when you eventually read it. Whether on this side of the Atlantic or that she was always pleased to see us, always generous to a tee (paying for the overwhelming majority of our meals out no matter where we were, and brooking no argument on the subject), and always made sure we had a full supply of breakfast bagels and coffee when we went there, and that she brought a good supply of Riceroni and pumpkin pie mix when she came here. And marmalade. Oh that homemade marmalade! There's nothing like it on Earth, and the frighteningly meagre supply now sitting in our fridge is the last there will ever be. I hardly dare spread it on a single slice of toast, but when I do - and for as many times as I do - I'll offer up a silent prayer of thanks. I tried many times without success to persuade Nikki to make it while Shirley was still with us. Now I just have to hope that the recipe is one of those that "just works" without her magic touch. What are the chances?

My Inbox is considerably less busy these days too. Shirley was well-connected, email-wise, and the constant stream of jokes, funny photos, or inspiring PowerPoint slide decks that flowed from her was a regular and welcome source of laughs, gasps and awwwwws.

But inevitably our opportunities to get better acquainted were limited by both time and distance. Listening to Nikki, Paul and Stewart relate tales of their childhood in her house, reading the emails of condolence from her widespread friends and acquaintances met on her many cruises, seeing the effect of her passing on everyone we came into contact with on our visit, brought it home just how much she was loved by everyone who knew her, or whose lives she touched.

"It's a great life, John, if you don't weaken," she regularly said to me. And until the very end, she never did. A remarkable woman in every way.

For once, I have no clever title

Woke at 1.01am for yet another nocturnal "visit" and, still wide awake more than an hour later, I finally decided I might as well get up. The clock check was 2.22. I experience a lot of these nicely patterned times, especially at night (I've written several times about them before under the 'spookiness' tag) and I have no idea why. Maybe seeing patterns in things is a sign of mental illness. But there again, being able to wonder if it is is probably a sign that I'm alright. :o) But this post isn't about spooky patterns on the clock, or insomnia.

My Mum died on Sunday night.

Didn't get much sleep that night either, but more a case of never getting to sleep in the first place. At least, not until after 3.30. And then I was up again two hours later. Last night was a bit better (being knackered helps) but tonight it looks like I'm back on the merry-go-round of thinking of everything I need to do, and things I already did. Things I didn't do that maybe I should have.

I've been telling people it wasn't unexpected, and it wasn't. She had COPD, and everyone knows that's a one-way street, but more than that - after the events of recent weeks we would have to have been abnormally ostrich-like not to expect "the worst." But can you ever be prepared for it? Maybe on an intellectual level. Perhaps that intellectual preparation allows you to skip the traditional first stage of grief - i.e. denial. Although, you know, the irony of denying that I'm in denial is not lost on me. I seem to be missing out on the 'anger' part as well. Who would I be angry with? Mum? It's hardly her fault (apart from the smoking of course, but it feels like it's always been decades too late to do anything about that). The care home? They did what they could. God? Let's not even go there. And what would I be angry about? That she's free from pain? No longer has to fight to get every breath? That - the next few weeks of estate management aside - I'm absolved from the duty of those five-hour round trips to visit someone who had become unrecognisable as the woman most often referred to as "awesome" by my friends, old and new, and those of my in-laws that met her. Whose failing memory left her incapable of remembering conversations we'd repeated four times since our arrival not half an hour earlier? And, perhaps more significantly, of remembering that we had visited at all. Or telephoned, on the weeks we couldn't visit.

I'd rather friends remembered her as the vibrant capable welcoming whirlwind who cooked up a full fried English breakfast for eight when we dropped in unannounced one Bank Holiday Monday morning after an all-night party. That breakfast is still fondly remembered more than thirty years later by all who partook.

There's a lot more to say, but I have that happy memory in my mind so I'll stop for now.

Vinyl: Making Movies

Artist: Dire Straits
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

This is the one. The album that first really got me into Dire Straits. The album I remember listening to lying on the floor of a Lake District living room, cans firmly fixed to head, trying to ignore all the point-scoring shit that regularly flew around that particular bunch of in-laws. I immersed myself in the music for as long as I could. Which turned out to be until Momma In-Law burst in and ordered all the "children" (the youngest of us was, at that time, 23) out so that the "adults" could sit in comfort with their "adult" conversation.

Interesting to reflect with my traditional 30-year perspective that the behaviour that was soon to follow that event was not what anyone could pretend deserved the tag: adult.

Even with such uncomfortable associations, the music's still good :o) I've marked the "want to replace" flag as 'yes' above, but a closer look at the track list shows there's only a couple that I don't already have on various digital compilations (Alchemy, Very Best of...) so I'm not convinced it's worth it.

Vinyl: Airborne

Artist: Curved Air
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: No

During that eventful year when I was the student union Socials Secretary, one of the bands I most enjoyed putting on was Curved Air, mainly because it gave me chance to get close to lead singer Sonja Kristina; every inch the young man's dream.

I can't honestly claim to have been a huge Curved Air fan - this was the only album of theirs in my collection - and with the passing years the memory of how it sounded, or even what tracks it held, has faded to almost nothing. So I was grateful to Wikipedia (and the *real* fans who maintain copious detail of the music) for some insight into what was on this particular album, and also for the unexpected memory jog that the title "Hot & Bothered" gave me, bringing back as it did the recollection of sitting in my garret room in halls, spinning the vinyl and singing along while pretending to write out my lecture notes for the day.

That Wikipedia page held a few more surprises. You can tell I've never been much of a "fan boy" when it comes to music. Never really followed many bands to any great extent (apart from the obvious Caravan and Genesis), or got to know the names of the band members much beyond the lead singer. So I never realised Stewart Copeland was their drummer before he went on to The Police, or that he later married Sonja Kristina. Following her Wikipedia link (purely in the interests of research, naturally) uncovered the revelation that at the age of 61 she is still touring, still making music, releasing a (compilation) album as recently as last year. Good onja, Sonja!

Simple Things

Stress. There's been a lot of it around lately. After a blissful couple of months following the last round of construction where not very much was happening (although the thought of the Large Decorating Project loomed... er... large), things have been hotting up both at work and at home.

I don't often write much about work. There's a few reasons. I hate it. It's government work, so I can't really give much away in any case. And it bores me, so I always assume it would bore the heck out of you too. But in recent weeks we've been reaching the end of an 18-month project and that means... it's RELEASE TIME. Anyone who has ever worked on a computing project will recognise the stress involved, as all the designs become real, all the bugs are flushed out and run scurrying around the place before they're stamped on by the right fix, and all the managers call endless review meetings and micro-manage the hell out of us to make themselves feel better about approaching deadlines and growing bug counts.

And us architects and designers scratch our heads and wonder why on Earth it is behaving like THAT when our designs say it should behave like THIS.

On the home front - well, more about that later - but Other Projects have been occupying us there too, so between looking forward to the weekends all week, and then spending all weekend on Projects, it's all go go go.

Unlike the totally unreasonable Work Managers, who demand more and more from less and less, I am blessed with a wonderful Home Manager. Nikki makes sure amid the hustle and bustle of home improvements that we always enjoy some down time at the weekend. Even when we're working to a deadline we can always take time out for a nice meal, watch a movie, and relax in the evenings. Even when we have to go shopping (yuk!) we grab a breakfast panini and a coffee at Starbuck's. She makes it fun, whatever we're doing, so it's never a chore.

There's one more thing that I find helps to de-stress me in these cold, wintry months of short days and dark mornings. A simple, natural thing. Bird song in the morning.

When I was a kid I lived a few minutes walk away from a small copse. The remnant of a larger wood that had mostly been cleared to make way for housing in the late 40s/early 50s, the copse covered only about an acre, but was full of mature trees, well-worn mud paths, the odd "secret" clearing and an abundance of wildlife. I used to love walking there on summer days, with the sunlight shooting luminous con-trails through the canopy and the birds chattering and peeping from the treetops and bushes.

The first time we viewed this house, I was immediately attracted by the huge trees all around. They support a healthy population of the usual British garden birds - finches, tits, sparrows, etc - as well as a large number of magpies and woodpigeons. We have occasionally spotted something a little more exotic - a woodpecker or a sparrowhawk - but it's the common birds kicking up their morning chorus that I love. All that bickering and calling back and forth takes me back to those boyhood days in the copse and puts a smile on my face to start the day.

Soapy fish

Part of a conversation we were having the other day triggered a childhood memory illustrating an almost-forgotten art in modern households. Thrift. For your own amusement, try explaining this to one or more young people between the ages of 10 and 25, and watch their faces as the disbelief and incredulity mounts at the realisation that anyone could have gone to so much trouble to save such small sums of money.

When I was a kid, soap was - relatively - expensive. Or at least, that's what my Mum told me (hence the tag). So it was important to make it last as long as possible. Naturally, that didn't involve NOT washing - being thought dirty was a crime (or even, a SIN!) even worse than being thought a spendthrift - but it did mean hanging on to each bar of soap until it was totally used up, and we had an ingenious method of using those last tricky little slivers that could slip out of your hand and hide on bathroom floor, behind the pedestal. A soap fish. Made of synthetic sponge in the shape of a fish - it had eyes, and fins, and everything - you could shove your soapy remains up its jacksie and use it to wash in the bath. And I did. Pretty much until I started big school. I clearly remember the frustration of not being able to actually play with the damn thing in the bath - it was a fish, after all - on account of that dissolving its soapy guts too quickly for True Thrift(*). No, it was for washing, not for playing. That was made abundantly clear.

The soapy sponge fish (or was it a spongy soap fish?) fell apart eventually, and my Mum was gutted to discover she couldn't find a replacement anywhere. It was OK though, because by then I was old enough to learn the trick of "gluing" the old sliver of soap to a new bar, carefully sticking down the edges all round so you didn't accidentally knock the parasitic little piece off its bigger, younger brother. Waste not, want not, as was constantly drummed into me as soon as I was old enough to hear.

Incidentally the "importance" of not wasting soap - engraved deeply as it was on my psyche as a child - stayed with me long after it should have done. I think I was in my early forties, stood at the bathroom sink gluing some soap together when I suddenly thought "what the FUCK am I doing?"

(*) Could be a good title for a movie. What do you think?

The smell of green

I took the car to the garage this morning. Its 'Engine Management' light had been glowering at me for some days. In recent months this hasn't been cause for concern as, before I could (be arsed to) organise a visit to the garage, it would go out again. And then come on again, a few weeks later.

This time it came on and stayed on.

Worse than that, on long journeys (such as last Friday, and again on Sunday) the car would give a worrying lurch, the light would start flashing, and the performance of the car dip alarmingly, as if it's only firing on two cylinders. Which, given it's the Engine Management light, is entirely possible. So I booked it in yesterday, and dropped it off this morning.

The garage I've used since the demise of the garage I used to use before I started using the one I use now, is only a short walk away, which is the main reason I chose it. That, and the fact that it comes highly recommended on the local community forum. It's wedged between two semi-detached houses on a bend in a normal suburban street, so "dropping the car off" entails hunting down a parking space before walking back to the garage to leave the keys.

I started to explain where I'd left it. "I'll find it," he breezed. How are you going to do that when you haven't even asked me for the registration, I wondered? I offered him the registration. "You wouldn't believe how many people don't know their own registration," he mused. Well actually mate, given my penchant for examining the human condition, I would.

Walking back from the garage through the leafy streets of Whalley Range on what was a sunny morning following a rainy night, the smells of fresh grass, early hints of autumn, and rain-dampened pavements evoked many memories. Something smells are known for, but for some reason this morning the memories were more powerful than usual. Maybe it's because I don't walk anywhere very much any more, whereas as a boy I walked the 2-3 miles home from school every day. I should do it more often really. But not, I hope, on account of having more car trouble!

The Graduand

I always remember it being "The Graduate" but I guess that means someone who has already graduated. What I learned today, and the first time I'd ever heard the term, is that someone in the act of going through the process of graduation is a graduand.

And how do I know this?

Because I attended Nat's graduation ceremony this morning.

I always hesitate to say that any one particular event or occasion has made me proud of either or both of my daughters, because the simple fact is that never a day goes by without me thinking how proud I am of them. I used to get really pissed off when someone would say to my mother "oooh he's a credit to you, Kath." I remember thinking "hang on, this is me. I've done this, not her." So I'm not going to fall into the trap of taking any credit for the wonderful people they've turned into. They're a credit to themselves, which is way, way more important than being a credit to me. In everything they do, write, or say. In every joke they crack, every kind word or deed, every mistake corrected or lesson learned, they fill their old Dad with wonder and pride and joy.

So, before this turns into a total gushfest of fatherly sentiment (too late! LOL) I'll bring it back to today, which if you like was a crystallisation of all of that, and more. The ceremony was relatively short, which was a blessing. A little of the Vice Chancellor and his soporific tones goes a long way, and on top of that I had... er... company. It was... not exactly comfortable, but, well, let's just say it could have been worse. Before we knew it the first of the 204 graduands was mounting the stage to collect their faux certificate (yes folks, that's a fake scroll they collect - it has to look good for the cameras) and I knew Nat would be concentrating on one thing - getting up and down those stairs without having a pratfall in full view of the assembled throng and those darned cameras.

I soon worked out that the ceremony was proceeding in alphabetical order of degree which meant we'd have the longest possible wait for the Zoology grads, but they zipped through the other 180-odd in record time and pretty soon I was on my feet trying to get a decent shot of The Handshake. I'd been practising with burst mode on my camera expecting that to give me four or five decent shots of the crucial moment. Big mistake. Rather than the one decent shot I would have been guaranteed had I stuck with the tried and trusted method, I ended up with four blurry snapshots on which Nat is barely recognisable. I redeemed myself (somewhat) later by capturing on video the replay of the "graduation DVD" footage that was being repeated on a loop in the other building.

And then suddenly... it was all over. Mother jumped a cab back to the train station and as neither Nat nor I really fancied sticking our little fingers out at the champagne reception, we drove home, stopping on the way to collect a celebratory Sub sandwich, which I reckon must taste even better when you're eating it as a fully fledged Bachelor of Science :o)

Reality check

The dust has settled after Monday morning's revelation of the UKSC results for 2010, and - with the help of a distant friend from the Pacific Northwest - I've gained some perspective.

Give myself some credit, she wisely wrote: it wasn't so very long ago that I hadn't written a song in my entire life. True, that. And now I've co-written not one but two songs which have received the accolade of being "good songs that almost made the semi-final" in one of the most prestigious songwriting competitions in the world. So yes, maybe that's not so bad after all.

I've been thinking a lot today about the source of my reaction to bad - or should I say "not glowing" - criticism. I've decided it comes from a long way back, from the time when my mother used to tell me "don't be an also-ran, John." Unfortunately her parenting skills only stretched as far as sharing aphorisms like that with me. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, neither a borrower nor a lender be, you know the kind of thing. While she was off congratulating herself on what a good job she was doing bringing me up, I was left to wonder (a) what an also-ran was - I was very young at the time - and (b) how to avoid being one.

What she meant, I soon realised, was that she wanted me to be a winner. What she wasn't able to do much of was give me, or help me find, the skills to become one. I was on my own with that one. And what she clearly was never able to grasp is that there's one thing worse than being an also-ran, and that is to never run at all. Which is what most people do, and, to a very great extent, what she herself has done. At least we *entered* the contest in the first place. We set ourselves up to be measured. We ran the race. And if it wasn't for "also-rans," there wouldn't be a race to win.

So thanks Mum, but I'll take also-ran for now. In fact I'll revel in it. And while we're at it, if I wasn't a borrower I wouldn't have a house to live in, and not checking those gift horses' mouths just gives people free rein (see what I did there?) to dump a load of old tat on you.

I'll let you know when I think of one of those hackneyed old parental phrases that was worth listening to.

Google and Pac-Man

Google's "doodles" - the changes to their logo they make every so often to celebrate some national or international event, holiday, or hot news topic - have quickly become legendary. In fact one of the only complaints I have with the iGoogle home page is that we never see any indication that there's a new doodle to enjoy.

Last weekend, two legends collided. It was the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, widely regarded as "the game that started it all" (even though, being first released in 1980, it trailed Space Invaders by two years), and in celebration Google installed its first fully interactive doodle - a working copy of Pac-Man with the maze spelling out "Google" and whose gameplay faithfully reproduced the original, including ghost behaviours, fruits, and even the original bug that corrupts the screen on the 256th level.

Media coverage suggests that the game didn't start playing unless you pressed the Insert Coin button (which temporarily replaced the usual "I'm Feeling Lucky"), but this certainly wasn't true for me. Maybe it's different on Chrome, but the game started right up after a short delay and I reached instinctively for the arrow keys (I was a huge Pac-Man fan) and began playing immediately. I reached the fifth level, which I was pretty pleased about given that I haven't played for, like, 20 years. Some things never leave you.

But celebrating Pac-Man's 30th birthday, and Google's inventiveness and sense of fun, is only part of the reason for this post. And it's the "sense of fun" angle that I'd like to concentrate on first, because to me that's what it was all about. It was a weekend, Google's doodles are a fine tradition that always raise a smile in our house, and this particular doodle gave Google's users the chance - briefly - to relive a much-loved time in their youth when it was OK to while away a few hours chasing an animated cartoon mouth around a maze.

So it was with a dawning sense of OMG that I read some of the 571 comments posted on the news article I found on the subject. Many of them mirrored my own reaction ("wow" "cool" "brings back memories" etc) but fully half of them were complaints about the noise, about the intrusion into their browser space, about the waste of time and money, and any other possible thing you could think of to complain about and even some that would never occur to most people I know. Incredible.

These comments drew stinging reactions from the supporters of Google's efforts, as you'd expect, with people pointing out variously that Google (and all its services) is free, that doodles are only ever up for a day (or two at most), that all computers are equipped with a "mute" function, and that in the end if they weren't happy, why didn't these people just close their browsers or navigate to another page? But all of that common sense couldn't hide the fact that there are vast numbers of people out there who have utterly lost their sense of humour, of fun, and of celebration. And what's worse, they're not even prepared to sit quietly while those of us who haven't lost those things get on with it.

It gets worse.

Someone who must recently have had a humourectomy has now calculated the world-wide LOSS OF PRODUCTIVITY that the Pac-Man doodle caused. Yep. Five million man hours, apparently, giving a total monetary value - based on a low-to-average U.S. salary - of $120 million. A figure arrived at using some broadly-drawn assumptions on the amount of time usually spent on the Google home page versus the amount of time spent there when the Pac-Man doodle was active.

Oh dear. Oh woe is me. For a few extra seconds, all over the world, people weren't making money. Strike us all down with a bolt of lightning. Good grief. One of the saddest aspects of "this modern world" which has crept up on us during those thirty years since Pac-Man arrived, is that too many people have forgotten there is more to life than making money. Lift your heads up from those desks, people. Take your noses from the grindstone for a few precious minutes and have some fun ffs.

Book Review: Fatal Revenant

Way back in October 2008 I reported finding the first two books of Stephen Donaldson's Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I read book 1 on our Lakes week last October and since then I've been waiting for a chance to pick up book 2. This week has provided that chance and I've been devouring Fatal Revenant's 856 pages since Sunday morning.

I don't want to give too much away, but I will say I found this every bit as riveting as the first book. It's true that you have to be prepared to do battle with Donaldson's style when he's writing about the Land. The constant repetition of his heroes' fear, anguish, trepidation, suffering, loss and uncertainty which was such a signature feature of the first two trilogies is here once again, in spades, and it can get very wearing.

But overwhelmingly, this is a monumental success. Not only does Donaldson pick up the threads of every story, race and being that has gone before, and weave them into a narrative that fits as comfortably as an old cardigan, but he then skilfully embroiders that cardigan with a host of new characters, races and situations that are so cleverly explained and so thoroughly well thought-out that you can't tell the embroidery was never part of the original cardigan.

Moreover Donaldson's skill as a story teller, already epic at the time he wrote the first Chronicles, has achieved a hitherto undreamt of level of mastery. The complexity of this tale, as Linden Avery confronts a host of opponents some of whom endure bitter rivalries of their own and hence can occasionally appear to be her allies, others who are virtually their own hero and foe simultaneously, and continues to journey with a rare admixture of characters each of whom has a mystery to solve or at least one hidden aspect, is breathtaking. One of the most satisfying and rewarding reads I can remember for many years.

I can't really get the hang of this blogging lark

I always seem to be two weeks behind with this. I watched Steve Davis finish his first round match against Mark King in the 2010 World Snooker championships last week and wanted to put something in writing about how impressed I'd been, not just with his performance - still managing to win matches at this level at the age of 52 and on his 30th appearance at the Crucible; still committed enough to put in the hours of practice he must need to counteract the loss of visual acuity and muscle tone that the ticking clock must bring - but with the reaction of the crowd. The standing ovations as he entered the arena were really very moving. The entire audience recognising his achievements not only on the table but as an ambassador for snooker in particular and sportsmanship in general, in a way I can't imagine them doing for any other player.

But despite starting that post last week, I never got around to finishing it. A few days passed, Steve won his second round match and made it to the quarters. A fantastic achievement that energised the whole competition. There were reports of people stopping him in the street to congratulate him, and somehow the lights over the baize seemed to shine brighter and the balls on the table were more colourful in the reflected glory of his success.

The dream stopped at the quarter finals, where he was beaten by the guy who would eventually go on to win - Australian Neil Robertson. Throughout all that drama I either couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to put finger to keyboard, or I was in the Lakes, away from the computer.

You may have spotted that I couldn't possibly have known that Neil Robertson won on the date this post was made. It didn't happen until the Bank Holiday Monday after we returned from the Lakes. I'm writing this up on the 7th of May, and that's what I mean by being two weeks behind. This has turned (or has always been) more of a retrospective record of events than a blog, and it's beginning to do my head in.

Trouble is, whenever I enjoy a spurt (of writing activity I mean) and catch up, this will inevitably be followed by a period where there's nothing to write about, or a total dearth of enthusiasm. Back the pendulum swings and I'm two weeks behind again. >sigh< I guess there are more important things to worry about :-\