Friday 21 September 2007

#25 *

I keep forgetting to say why I called this blog 'Blame Uncle Clive'. Well, for starters, I'm not Uncle Clive. Nor do I have an uncle who is called Clive, nor are there any parentally-aged friends of the family called Clive who could be 'honorary uncles'... nor do I have any young friends called Clive who I call Uncle in some sort of ironic way. Infact I do not know anyone called Clive at all. I don't even know if the bloke I refer to as Uncle Clive, has any nieces or nephews.... I hope he does though, because he would make a most goodly uncle... infact it would be one of the acest things if this Uncle Clive was actually your real Uncle Clive, especially if it was during the early Eighties. But whether he has actual nieces or nephews or not, most people who think of him as Uncle Clive are no relation and have never met him... possibly there are many thousands of us who affectionately call him Uncle Clive. Can you guess who it is yet? He's as British and as inventive as Baird, Swan, or the real McCoy. He is of course Sir Clive Sinclair. He's the one to blame. He's the one that gave a glimmer of hope that life might actually turn-out to be interesting, creative, even exciting, for the common man. Imagine, if you will, it had only been about half a decade since man first walked on the moon and Concorde had started conveying passengers at over twice the speed of sound -- technology seemed to be racing ahead, but those giant exciting steps for mankind didn't really seem to be directly effecting the boring everyday life of a man (or of a boy as I was then)... ordinary life was still very very ordinary. At first there were...hmm.. err.. I know: biros, oo and digital watches and electronic calculators (although you were still not allowed to use them in school because it was thought they'd turn your brain to jelly)... oh and things like smaller, cheaper, more reliable radios and, later, tellies thanks to transistors'n'silicone chips. I can't remember the exact year, and anyway perhaps it'd been going-on for a while without me noticing... but finally, finally, something really new and interesting did happen... something especially interesting to your typical boy like me (no, not girls, apparently they weren't new and had been invented long ago)... that miracle of technology had arrived: computers! That's what happened: computers. And none of your boring boring boring boring boring desk top PC shit either... no... and the chances are the first time the average 'man on the street' got down and dirty and interfaced with a computer was indeed: on the street, by going into the arcade, or even into their local chip shop for that matter, to play Space Invaders, Asteroids, and the like -- proper proper computers, cool computers... no not just 'cool' but 'kuh-oo-oo-ool'. Computers that would still be just as fun and easy to use today as they were then. Babbage, Lovelace would have wet themselves with glee if they could have seen how their science had been used to excite the senses and in such a fun way. When going on your hols to the coast with your Mum Dad and Sister the arcades beckoned, they were the highlight of the whole trip. Imagine where there had been a 'man-machine interactivity void' since the year dot for there to be, seemingly suddenly, these boxes with space ships, cowboys, submarines, aliens and missiles darting around their screens in hot glowing phosphor, drawing your gaze like a magnet, ready to be controlled by you. Oh and the sound -- one of my favorite sounds in the whole world was that of the late 70's arcade... because each sound was synthesized and comparatively simple and pure compared to the sounds of today's computer games so they didn't merge together as a mush of noise but instead they formed a beautiful varied mix of sound, like the dawn chorus on some far-off tropical alien world. If only I could hear that sound again. If only. The fun continued. More and more interesting games appeared, and also you began to be able to buy simple video games to play at home, which usually consisted of batting piercingly white square balls back and forth across your old valve telly's screen. It was one era handing over to the next really, as the old valve telly hosted the youthful exuberance of the new silicone chipped computer... the latter, incidentally, hastening the demise of the former by its brilliant white bats and balls permanently burning themselves into the tellies' phosphor screens. Then things moved-up a notch -- I remember in 1979 seeing a proper version of Space Invaders on an Atari console at my friends house on a telly-- now that was impressive, very impressive. But something was missing in all of this for a young enquiring mind. My Farther worked for a large company: Lucas, where they actually had a computer for doing design work on (Computer Aided Design as it is known) and he would sometimes talk about them and try and explain to me about how you write a program and how the computer follows it...I remember at the time I couldn't quite 100% get it because computers were like nothing ordinary people had ever dreamt-of, so without my Dad making it into a detailed lecture about how you made programs and how they were stored and all that (which might have risked putting me off the subject) it was just hard for me to imagine how all this stuff really worked.... however he had achieved the important thing of planting that notion in my head that people programmed computers and maybe, just maybe, one of those people, one day, might be me. And slowly but surely every video game I played a tiny nagging feeling or notion grew that someone, somewhere, was making... programming... these games, which gradually fed a frustration that I was being left-out. By this time, the late 70's, there were computers that you could buy and program but they did cost a couple of thousand quid for the most basic one, or at least that's what I remember from watching Tomorrow's World back then. Britain was still very poor compared to the USA and these computers must have been aimed at the US market because literally no-one I knew, no-one my parents knew, or even anyone I had ever even heard-of, owned or had access to a computer that you could program. No-one but no-one. Essentially they did not exist. Then it happened. One of those people who had been making those there new-fangled calculators that had been turning childrens' brains to jelly: Clive Sinclair, made something new -- he'd only gone and dun-it hadn't he? The clock struck 1980 and the 21st century began 20 years early in our household. The ZX80 was born -- a user programmable computer that could be bought for just 100 quid...it even had rudimentary graphics. My Dad was quite quick off the mark and ordered his quite soon after pawing-over the ads in The Observer colour supplement...he was very keen, both to get his hands on it himself, and to educate me about computers, in equal measure. It was fantastic... ideal timing for a 14 year old too, here was modern technology and I could control it. My Dad, of course did his best to try and enthuse me to use it for maths and physics calculations to help me learn about those subjects at the same time as learning about computers, and he did have some success with me... but mainly I was totally blinkered and set about experimenting writing games every spare moment. It was primitive compared to arcade games -- for starters you couldn't do animations unless they were extremely flickery because the computer was not powerful to display the picture on the telly and do calculations at the same time. I remember writing a space rocket flight type emulator -- which could not have any graphics due to the ZX80' limitations -- it just had lots of figures like velocity and gravity etc... and I also wrote a cowboy 'draw and shoot' quick-gun reaction time game where the computer was one cowboy and you were the other.

Well that was the start of the golden age of computers (which I will cover in a future blog entry) where nearly everything in the field of software was still out there to be invented, and games were still games and not alternate realities. For now I think the golden age has long finished, it perhaps finished in the mid Nineties, but that's not to say there is not another one just round the corner and we won't know until it hits us in the face. At the moment things have fragmented a bit too much and become a bit too abundant -- too much of a good thing -- there are so many different types of computer with different types of operating systems ('platforms') it's hard to know where to begin or which to choose to program games for. You can't even program some computers at all, like the games consoles, because the manufacturers only allow established companies to program them -- nothing there for the common man. And even platforms you can program, like the PC with windows, you have to choose a computer language and vendor and do a lot of down-loading of development kits and all sorts before you can actually write a single line of program, and not to forget that it takes 5 minutes for a PC to boot before you can do anything at all on it.... you see with the ZX80 (and its successors the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum) you could just switch it on and literally within 5 seconds you could be programming -- the only language available for it: BASIC, was already loaded and ready to go. So the choice of platform was something that you didn't have to worry about in 1980. It's a bit like telly, once there was not much to watch and only 2 or three channels -- but it wasn't half quick to decide what you wanted to watch, and, chances are, you friends watched the same programme so you had a shared experience, and you didn't have the nagging feeling that you were missing something good on some other channel so you appreciated it much more.


Sadly now, there are no people visiting the moon, there is no supersonic passenger travel, and there are no natty little computers that anyone can switch-on and instantly program a little game on when ever the mood takes them without the distractions of email and operating system updates and virus checkers and goodness knows what else. In my opinion we are back in 1968. Roll-on 1980 o'clock.

Thursday 20 September 2007

#24

I caught part of 'Any Answers?' on Radio 4 and as usual there was something on it to boil my blood. Any Answers is phone-in programme where callers put their views on the subjects discussed on a programme called 'Any Questions?' on an earlier day. (Any Questions? is like the BBC1 telly programme 'Question Time'). At least on Any Questions? it is politicians who are discussing stuff and because you're used to their general blah blah pattern of speech when they talk crap, you can just let it wash over you and you don't get bothered by it too much. I'm sure you've all heard low-brow phone-in programmes on local radio where you get a relentless precession of idiots phoning-in who are all infuriating... however, Any Answers? is more of a roller-coaster listen because some (not many though) callers are extremely well informed and have very well considered views, but you still do get the real idiots, just like you do on the local radio phone-ins, so your spirits are lifted then your blood is boiled alternately in the same programme interspersed with eye brow converging nose wrinklingly perplexing moments where you are forced to just flop back in your chair, look into space, and say: 'eh?'

.... anyway what made me livid this week was people phoning-in, from both England and Scotland, each saying their country would do much better financially, commercially, etc, if it left the UK, and hence that it should. I really cannot think how the people of the UK came to totally loose the plot like this. What the feck has money got to do with nationality??? Is that all people think of these days: money. Doesn't anyone have a heart any more? Nationality should be about people, geography, landscape, history, language... the food you eat, the air you breath, and the love of the very ground you walk on. Money?... money?... Would you marry for money, or divorce for the lack of it? You're in need of a heart and a soul if you would. I have every respect for people who want to see their country independent because they feel it in their heart.... although personally, I feel Britain in mine.

I can understand people being upset about money, but that should be a reason to campaign to make things fairer and get things sorted-out properly, but not a reason to abandon ship.

Monday 17 September 2007

#23

Sunday's surfing trip went well. I only got a sprained foot this time -- much better than manking my knee joints as I have done for the previous two years. I put my comparative good fortune down to steering clear of Widemouth Bay (Bude, North Cornwall) and heading further down the coast. Widemouth is a bit bad-ass. What surprised me is that I have seen it listed in a few places on the web as a good place for novice surfers. Good in what way I wonder... good at crippling novices perhaps because in my experience it has some very nasty tricks: its worst is that every so often about 5 waves combine together (as each wave gradually catches-up with the wave in-front) to produce vertical walls of water. Not a nice clean wall, but a raging wall of foam about 8 feet high. Also the out-wash of the spent waves flowing back down the beach is some of the most rapid and force-full I have come across. Just a few inches in depth of it has, on a number of occasions, dragged me flailing around uncontrollably from the shallows back into the sea. The shallows rapidly clear meaning that the advancing 8 foot wall of water is often racing across bare sand and rocks and if you are unlucky enough to find yourself perched on top of that wall, on your surfboard, as I was once, if you fall off in-front of the wall you have no water below to break your fall. It's a bad bastard time. Fortunately I did not fall forward off my board -- I decided not to stand for starters (on account of being scared shitless) and kept my weight well back on the board to stop myself going over the edge, but I so nearly did, especially when an additional wave came in from the rear and suddenly tipped me forward onto the brink. It was a similar wall of water that caused my worst surfing injury so far. This time I was in the shallows in-front of the developing wall of water. I was at the time unaware of this 'Widemouth wall-of-water' phenomenon so I was not really looking-out for the danger. At the time Barkfoot and I we were trying to launch his kayak into the sea. By the time we saw the impending danger it was too late for me. Barkfoot managed to run out of the way but the powerful out-wash had buried my feet in the sand and I was stuck fast. Total wipe-out: the wall of water delivered a powerful thump on it's own but, as if that was not enough, it was carrying the gift of Barkfoot's kayak directly at my captive legs. Ow. That particular injury kept me walking about with the aid of a stick for a month. I guess we should have heeded the warning signs... amongst which were the fist-sized boulders floating-around in shallows about an inch or so off the sand, held up by some bizarre hydrodynamic effect. These were ordinary stones as heavy as you like, clattering around your ankles. We should have been more worried than bemused, and got-out while we could. The currents are just crazy on that beach. Once I was in the water upto my chest and the sheer sudden difference between the under current and the surface current pulled my knee out of joint. Fortunately it went back into its socket straight away because it did not get twisted -- it was exactly like someone had grabbed my ankle and suddenly pulled directly down -- well crazy.


Well, anyway, only a sprained foot this time as I say. The waves weren't that good but it was well worth the trip to get dunked in the drink, churned-up, and get slabs of water blasted in y'face -- it helps you feel connected to the world: if you're ever susceptible to deflating philosophical thoughts such as: 'Do I really exist?' and: 'Could all this just be a dream from a sleep in another reality?', then after having cold refreshing reality beaten into you by the power of the sea, I'd venture that you'd feel inclined to scrap that line of thinking pretty smartish

During the journey it is customary for me to mainly exist on oat based snaks: flapjacks mainly. Of the big brands the Marathon flapjack is probably the best, but generally the thinker, solid-er, and heavier the flapjack usually the better --- a more reliable indicator of flapjack yummyness than price or boastful slogans on the packaging I find. The fish'n'chips I got on the way home from the Launceston Fryers were pretty good (not the best-est ever fish and chips but way above average). Being as it is early in the surfing season the part of the trip home along the unlit A30 was not cloaked in pitch black night -- it was only dusk, which is less beautiful and twinkly, but it does mean that the menace of the slowly driven Ford Focus is greatly diminished. For when it is totally totally pitch black and you only have the rear lights of cars to judge the distances by, that is when the danger emerges... because some Ford Focuses have lights much higher than most cars and they are not so far apart, so in the blackness they appear 20 or 30 feet further away then they actually are, making the approach upto a Focus ahead of you, which is being tootled along at say 45 when you are doing 70, quite alarmingly abrupt. If you often have to journey along straight fast unlit roads at night and and you like to take your time about it, then I would not make the Focus top of your list of potential buys for your next vehicular purchase -- personally I would feel vulnerable to rear end collisions. It has to be said that some other cars have similar rear lighting configurations, like the Vauxhall Corsa, but I've not noticed the problem with them... perhaps they don't frequent the A30. Talking about vehicular purchases, some might wonder why a cool surf dude like me... eh-hum... goes around in a 1992 Volvo 940 estate: it was basically the longest estate car I could think of -- all the better to fit a long surf board in. In fact the basic sequence of events was: buy the car, drive to the beach with a tape measure, fold the passenger seat etc forward, and see what would be the longest surf board I could possibly fit in there and go and buy it from the beach-side surf shop... then of course go surfing. An eight foot surfie stick easily fitted in there as you can see below.
Oh and before I forget -- back on to the subject of driving at night down the A30: expect the unexpected, because I have come across all-sorts in the middle of the road: like breeze blocks and cut lengths of log. Since it's as good a road as any motorway, it's easy to forget it's a local road as well, and owing to it running through mostly rural areas I suspect that it is host to more than the average number of open trailers and pick-up trucks from which these things fall.

Sunday 9 September 2007

#22


For the three days Friday, Saturday and Sunday I solely eat 'raspberries and cream' for lunch. I can't afford to have lunch and a pudding because I'm getting in shape for the surfing season (which, gadzooks, starts tomorrow!), so considering I over-bought on the double cream by a factor of three when my top notch Nephew and Sister and Cousin visited last week-end, the cream had to be used up, and my Mother obliged by buying loads of raspberries on a 2 for 3 offer. Well raspberries are good for you.. aren't they? Hmm, thinking about it this sounds very much like my rational for when I cannot resist the temptation of buying a chocolate bar to eat on the way home after a hard day at work: I buy a Marathon bar as apposed to, say, a Mars bar, because I can pretend to myself that I have gained some nutritional advantage from the peanuts in the Marathon bar, and so lessen the feeling of being a weak willed. Err, well, anyway, to counteract the effect of the oceans of double cream I have consumed, I had a cold-liver oil capsule or two to get some omega3 in me, help keep the blood going to those important bits like brain and stuff.

Eating the same unusual lunch three days in a row reminds me of the eating experiments I started to do many years ago... perhaps I'll try some more in the future. The inspiration came when I heard one food expert say on TV that you don't need to have a balanced diet where you eat a whole variety of stuff in one day: it's good enough to get the full breadth of food every few days, advice that has probably been contradicted since knowing these notoriously fickle dietary experts, but it did kind of conger-up an interesting picture in my mind of say just eating nothing but cabbage one day then nothing but potatoes the next then nothing but oranges the next and so on, and I think that inspired my eating experiments where I try eating nothing but one thing for a day. Well I'm glad that I didn't try eating cabbage for a whole day, in retrospect, because some years later I read that strange story in the Fortean Times of that bloke who eat loads and loads of cabbage and farted so much during his sleep in his poorly ventilated bedroom that he asphyxiated himself in his self-created sulphurous atmosphere of farts. I have to point-out here that these eating experiments of mine were nothing like the stupid experiments they do to athletes on Diet Doctors (#3) where people have to cram themselves stupid with one particular food for a whole week when the they know full well it will f**k them up.... my eating experiments were a genuine experiments to see what would happen (and not expecting anything bad), and just for the one day. Also it was before those very funny sketch-ettes on the Fast Show where the bloke emerges from an outside bog saying: "Today, I have mostly been eating...", which may well have put me off the idea. I remember the first eating experiment involved eating only beetroot for a day. Well, things seemed to go well, no ill effects were observed, and I didn't feel sick or anything. This somewhat lulled me into a false sense of security and by the following day I had resumed a normal diet and was thinking about other things when upon going for a wee I was horrified...oh no I'd better got to hospital there's blood in my urine....oh no.... oh,wait a minute... it's all that beetroot I eat yesterday... phew! I have since heard people since proclaim in a know-it all fashion: that it's a myth that beetroot makes your piss red -- an old wives tale they squawk... when I hear that I just smile to myself, and don't say anything, and speculate that one day the know-it-all eats enough to cause them an embarrassing trip to A and E the next day, only to find, after considerable unnecessary invasive procedures (on parts you'd rather not be subject to them), that actually, contrary to their smart-arse beliefs, beetroot does indeed turn your piss red. The next eating experiment was: pineapple, raw pineapple. Now the inadvisable nature of this experiment became apparent somewhat earlier-on in the day. I started the experiment in good spirits, cutting-up my nice big fresh pineapple and enjoying that great smell, relishing getting started. But it can't of been more than a couple of hours after eating about half of the pineapple before the pain started. It wasn't a bad pain at first, just mild discomfort of the tongue and gums. So I continued eating pineapple, but after about another hour was I curled-up on the floor in real pain! It felt like my gums were on fire. FIRE I TELL YE! Needless to say: that eating experiment was abandoned and it took endless swilling-out of my mouth with water to even start to make the pain go away. I almost, almost, went to hospital. It felt like my teeth were going to fall-out. Well, it wasn't until some months later that I learnt that the feeling of dental deciduousness was not far off the mark because, apparently, raw pineapple contains a powerful enzyme, which after prolonged exposure (presumably many days), does actually make your teeth quite literally fall-out! As a result of this experiment the obvious advice for consumers of pineapple is to either cook it first, or if you dare eat it raw -- do it in small portions... occasionally. Tinned pineapple is now always my preference since it is cooked during the canning process.

Tomorrow morning it'll be time to head-out on the road and head South West. Yksin. A journey which feels more like a mission because it's from the most urban of urban: Spaghetti Junction, to the the fresh foamy blue surf, calling from beyond the horizon. Some people might think of Spaghetti Junction as looking like the gates of Hell, where as I think she is a complete work of art: a gritty, grimy, twisted, mean bastard beautiful tangle of a construction, and because they built her so completely incompetently she's always changing, always having ugly arrays of metal drilled into it's dirty columns to stop them collapsing. They have to keep patching her up -- they can never, never, demolish and rebuild her because the entire nation would grind to a halt if they did... she is the diseased heart that pains you so but that you'd die without. When they banned lead in petrol they stole something from Spaghetti's beautiful urban heart, they stole her boast of having the highest air-borne lead levels anywhere in Europe but now the 'great unwashed' are buying diesel cars in their droves she has a new venom, venom of carcinogenic diesel soot, before she could only retard your childrens' mental development, now she can give you cancer, now, presumably, she can actually kill you. What ever is the current crime of the motor car, she'll concentrate it and spit in your face. What ever you think of Spaghetti, she's a damn good dramatic setting to start your journey to the coast -- and if you do think she looks like the gates of Hell, then just think how wonderful the gates of Hell would look if you're on your way out... not that Birmingham is any more hellish than other cities (except of course it can never be as hellish as the city that is the definition of Hades: London) it's just that any urban environment is only impressive and exciting in small doses, eventually it degrades you. So escape to the surf.

Saturday 8 September 2007

#21

Congratulations to anyone who has trudged through this blog from the beginning. I have been worried that some people have taken some of the entries a bit too seriously, and indeed Hermit did say in a recent email that he found the blog a bit depressing to begin with until he picked-up on the general tone of things. Some entries are serious but as a general rule if I'm complaining about brain problems or my ill fated exploits, it is probably my Marvinesque humour intended to entertain rather than depress. Marvinesque? Well Barkfoot's comments at the bottom of #1 were quite appropriate in saying it's just the diodes down my left side, because of course Marvin is the far from gruntled android in the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy. My favorite piece of actual Marvin humour is the part where he is asked why he has his head in a bucket of water to which he replied, something along the lines of: "Because it's easier to feel retched with your head in a bucket of water". To make the tone of my blog easier to get a handle on, I suppose I should have used emoticons, I think I may have forced myself to put in one or two but mainly my blog is devoid of them because I've never gotten used to using 'em ...they were a bit before my time you see.... and if I start using smiley faces now it would only make what has gone before look all the more serious by comparison. The only emoticon, of a kind, we had in my day, sonny, was the sign for sarcasm, which was an exclamation mark in brackets...but I have stopped using that now because what with all emoticons being pictorial in nature I dread to think what it could be misinterpreted as. What is very definitely before my time are emails without any punctuation in, at all... nor with capital letters at the start of sentences or for proper nouns, or anything... it's just all in capitals (or all in lower case if that's what the ol' caps lock was up-to at the time). Quite a culture shock to someone like me who even types his text messages in mixed case, fully punctuated. Not easy to read either for folk like me with brain problems. Actually I don't think I've had more than a couple of emails like that, but where you do see a lot of it is on internet forums...is it because people are posting to the forum from their mobile phone... is it because they are embracing a new enlightened unencumbered way of out-poring streams of pure human consciousness... or is it because they are morons? It seems to be only perpetrated by people below about twenty though ...and since women of that age are way too young for me it means that at least I don't have to encounter such literary mush, along with any potential embarrassing miss-understandings it might cause, when taking my occasional stab at using computer dating websites. I don't like taking more than an occasional stab at a dating site since you don't want to be rejected any more than once a fortnight do you?... if you were to put some real time into it you could be easily be rejected 10 times a week and if you were a shallow impulsive communicator (perhaps of the unpunctuating variety) I'm sure you could increase that number to 50 times a week. That could slightly take the edge off your confidence and general chirpy nature. Even just my low activity use of dating sites during my annual rutting season can really feel like you're wading through mud because supply and demand (for want of a more romantic or even raunchy expression) is totally totally out of whack:- any woman can put an ad on one of those sites without a photo, without anything special (probably even without punctuation) and get 10 unsolicited replies within three days... but if you're an average looking bloke with a photo and plenty of interesting description you're annual inbox of unsolicited messages will be exactly bloody zero. This is not totally to womens' advantage though as the demand seems to go to their heads and they become so unbelievably picky that they rarely find anyone meeting all of their many unrealistic criteria. How do I know woman have many unrealistic criteria?...because they sometimes list them all on their page! It really can be a depressing human version of a cattle market. Something has gone wrong somewhere. Considering the unbalanced supply and demand it's all the more surprising that woman, of say 40, may well send you a photo that is ten years old. 'OK', you might say, 'I bet the blokes do that too'. Well maybe many do, but I do not, so very naively I didn't expect women to either, which makes my introduction to this practice, one ill fated date of mine, all the more flabbergasting for me. Due to my brain problems (mental slowness), when it's not appropriate to show my disappointment, like when opening a disappointing Christmas present, I can usually hold back the accompanying facial expression... this is because, when I am considering something, it takes so long for nerve impulses to reach the muscles on my face that I can usually intercept and cancel the neurological signals before they have even left my brain. But after many favorable emails and chat room chats with one woman and receiving additional, unsuspectedly carbon-datable, photos of her:- when I actually met her her face-to-face on that ill fated date, I could not prevent the sheer shock I experienced from showing on my face, for she looked considerably considerably older than I expected. My face started with the initial quizzing facial expression of 'Who are you?' quickly morphing to: 'No it can't be.' and onto: 'No... it really is you, isn't it?' I'm pretty sure even my jaw dropped. Well, take it from me, that has to be one of the most effective ways of starting-off a date somewhat badly. I felt bad about it to begin with but it really wasn't my fault considering the data I had available, and the annoying fact was the deceit was unnecessary because she looked more attractive at forty than thirty really.... although I figured that mentioning she used to look a bit on the plain side but had greatly improved with age, would not really rescue the situation. I dunno...women hey, for some reason they just don't like back-handed complements. The date continued, painfully. And the next day, to really take the biscuit, came the verdict laden email from her which said: she did not fancy me. She did not fancy me? Me, who had sent an up-to-date photo, showing balding head in full view and all other possible put-offs openly declared days in advance? Time for me to make an exception and use an emoticon I think :-( Good night.

Wednesday 5 September 2007

#20

If you are highly susceptible to suggestion or you are in any way a hypochondriac or a sufferer of psychosomatic illnesses then do not read on. Because this week I have been suffering from the Jimmy Legs and while reading its definition on Wikkipedia I started to have the Jimmy Leg urges in parts I didn't think you could have them. I was already getting them in my back and the classic name-sake location: legs. If you don't know what the 'Jimmy Legs' is, it's the urge to move, usually your legs, to satisfy strange almost crawling 'stretch me' feelings in your muscles.
The Jimmy Legs complaint became much more widely known thanks to an episode of Seinfeld ('The Money') where Kramer's girl friend was disturbing his sleep with the Jimmy Legs.

For mild occasional sufferers, like me, suffering from the complaint is almost as amusing as the name itself. The particular brand of the complaint I suffer from I call: 'Isometric Jimmy Legs'...for example: if I get the Jimmy Leg urge to lift my leg up I will tense the muscles as if to do that but also the opposing muscles to counteract it so my leg does not move but it still hopefully satisfies the Jimmy Leg urge and stretches the right muscles. There are pro's and con's to this: the good side is that you don't have to wave your limbs about and attract attention to yourself when submitting to the urges (like you would with 'Concentric Jimmy Legs'), but if someone did happen to spot you Jimmying it would look well suspicious... especially if it's a back and leg Jimmy urge combo since it can result in subtle pelvic thrusts or bum sticky-out-y movements which could possibly be mistaken for some kind of surreptitious clandestine personal activity.

The Wikkipedia article about Jimmy legs says that only 2.5 percent of people suffer from it...personally I think it is more like 25 percent when mild sufferers are taken into account, so if you suffer from it then I reckon there's a good chance one of your friends does too... but wait... who has the best (or should I say worst) Jimmy Legs?? Because we all like a bit of one-up-man-ship when talking to our friends about our ailments so I have come-up with a Jimmy Legs scale ranging from Force 1 to Force 10. You can gauge your level by seeing where your experience fits on the scale below... I have placed scenarios on the scale so that you can compare your own experiences and judge the magnitude of your Jimmy Legness, however I don't think I've managed to make it very easy to pin-point your level of suffering from 1 to 10, but perhaps that's a good thing because when engaging in ailment jousting with your friends you want there to be at least a bit of room for inane disagreement. The definition for Force 1 and the potentially fatal Force 10 seem quite good though I think.



Force 1 --- You have urges in your muscles but it would not effect your concentration doing your work and you could easily resist the temptation to Jimmy-about for about 3 hours. For example if you were at work and started having the Jimmy Legs at 10am you could wait till lunch time till having a good Jimmy.

Force 2 --- You could concentrate on your work for about 15 minutes before having to Jimmy-about.

Force 3 --- Like Force2 but for about 5 minutes.


Force 4 ---Like Force 3 you could resist the temptation to Jimmy-about for about 5 minutes but it would be futile because you could not concentrate on your work until after you have satisfied the urges.

Force 5 --- If you were doing urgent and important work where others are relying on you where Jimmying-about might mean you did not finish in time, but where Jimmying-about was no risk to heath or safety, you could not resist the urges for more than 30 seconds. For example you have to submit a tender to a customer by a dead-line for your boss or else he loses the business.


Force 7 --- You would have to submit to your Jimmy urges if doing something urgent and important where others are relying on you and there is a small risk to heath or safety, for example if you had the Jimmy urges while driving your boss to the airport, with no spare time to stop, you would be able to wait until you were driving on a straight clear stretch of road before submitting to your Jimmy Leg urges -- you would not have to Jimmy-about while driving round a traffic island or navigating a road junction.

Force 8 --- You're are talking to your prospective boss (who doesn't strike you being even remotely the 'understanding type') at a job interview for a job you really really want but your Jimmy urges are so strong you cannot resist Jimmying about in front of him.

Force 9 --- As Force, 8 but you have been unemployed for over a year and your house is about to be repossessed.

Force 10 --- You have urges that are so strong that even if you were standing on the edge of a 100foot high cliff and you had urges in your legs, you could not resist Jimmying your legs about. [Obvious advice for sufferers at this level: keep away from the edges of cliffs.]


Myself: I had a few episodes of the Force 4 Isometric Jimmy Legs this last week. I wonder if cats have the Jimmy Legs. Sumpy the Cat does seem to have uncontrollable urges but they mainly seem to be the ones to lye on his side and shred the stair carpet at the bottom step with all fours, having some kind of 'possessed by the devil' look in his eyes...

Sunday 2 September 2007

#18

Ug. Didn't enjoy Saturday... I should have gone to the park or something, because the music from Tyrone's party (next door) was so loud I could not stand being in the back garden at all. It's worse when you have a set time in your mind for how long a disturbance will go on for and it goes-on for much much longer. Because I had kind-of assumed that the party might be over by... oo.. let's say 6pm...but no, it went on 'til 11pm, rather unexpected when you consider that Tyrone is only three. Tyrone and his fellow three year old friends (but unfortunately not the neighbours) must have been shipped-off to a quieter location after his birthday party before adult rowdiness took-over. Sunday was a relief, did the usual lawn mowing. My organic lawn looks the worst it has ever been after the two months of solid rain. There was a gathering at Russ's on Sunday night as is somewhat customary, and many many laughs were had. You might want to look at Barkfoot's latest blog entry to err, see, err.... And today (Monday) was really nice -- a relaxing lie on the grass with the Sun on my face in between Cortina renovation work, my idea of paradise. The six foot high daisies in my Mother's garden practically shone with warming summer yellow against the blue sky and fluffy white clouds.


A few days ago I discovered an animal burrow in the lawn. I pondered what animal the hole belonged to, and whether it would fall into the 'wild animal' or the 'vermin' category. And of course if it was vermin I would have to decide what to do about it and would be faced with options ranging from 'live and let live' to 'total annihilation'... but not relishing the possibility of having to execute some sort of rodent I came up with the brilliantly cowardly solution of delegating all responsibility to Sumpy the Cat.


To my surprise all I had to do was point to the hole and Sumpy seemed to immediately get the message that this was an issue that needed his expert attention. There was not a rodent in sight but it didn't stop Sumpy ramming his paw down the hole, sticking his nose in, and generally standing guard and peering-in.



Oh and before I forget (further to #15), here is some more advice on interfacing with the love'em'n'hate'em supermarkets:- when you come home from a super market wash your hands extremely well (and don't get your hands anywhere near you mouth before that). If you're a person who is unfortunate enough to suffer a lot of stomach aches, ask yourself if most of them occur within about 32 hours of doing your weekly shopping, I think you'll find they probably do. That's what I found was happening to me, but not anymore since I sussed it. I'm not talking about the actual food you buy posing a heath hazard (although the usually manky out-of-date produce from the delicatessen counters handled by hygiene shy assistants, are to be avoided at all costs). I am pretty sure that the source of infection is the handle bar of the super market trolley. Don't believe me? Well consider the life of the handle bar of the typical supermarket trolley during just one shop. It is a continuous cycle of people picking-up items off shelves and putting them in the basket and grabbing the handle to push the trolley to the next location. This probably happens 20 to 50 times. There's that source bottle you pick up that is all sticky because an adjacent bottle had broken during transit, then there are the packs of raw meat you pick-up and look over (a bit of blood may be leaking out of one pack), then there's the customer with the jippy tummy who has to visit the in store toilet due to being caught short, and add to this any dodgy micro-organisms that are already on customers hands when they arrive at the store.... it all builds-up on that handle bar, an ideal sticky pathological bacteria growing medium, like a petri dish spread with agar jelly and seeded with a huge variety of germs... and one of'em's out to get you!

Saturday 1 September 2007

#16

It's September! The surfing season is almost here. I'm considerably out of condition this year because of it raining throughout June and July -- meaning less walking, less gardening, less Cortina renovation work, and more sitting inside watching TV whilst eating cake and frowning at the black clouds though the window. It is only for the past few weeks that I have been solidly chanting the mantra: "Got to get in shape for the surfing season.", in my head over and over, and increasing my fitness. For me Summer starts now, even though now it is technically over, because now the sea is nice and warm and soon the children will be back at school and the holiday making traffic will subside... all is calm... all is uncrowded... on the coast.

And so, except for the bit by Bristol, the drive to the North coast of Cornwall down the M5 and the A30 is basically like a magic carpet ride. Come October, once you have cleared the winding stretches of Birmingham motorway your speedometer needle, quite literally, need not drop below 70 miles per hour for two hundred miles (well, bar that very windy bit that connects the M5 with the A30, and when you stop at a service station...and, well, OK drop the 'quite literally' bit). So here's to a great September, October, and November for every one. Oh yes, and lets hope I don't cripple my legs while surfing like I did the last two years, but looking on the bright side, on both occasions, the injuries did not occur 'til mid November, anyway...so it just meant bringing forward the Christmas pudding season a bit...mmm. There is one in the pantry right now maturing that can be called-upon immediately in the event of such an emergency.

Today I took a bit longer than usual to make lunch. One of my favorite lunches is pitta breads stuffed with water cress, olives, sweet pepper, tomatoes, chillies, lettuce and ... topped with Stilton which when put in the microwave for 2 minutes and 40 seconds melts through over all the afore mentioned ingredients and tastes so, so, good. Stilton -- THE KING OF ALL CHEESES! It's genius reasons like Stilton why I worship the very soil of Britain. Other countries look upon our food and scoff, but really they are crying inside because they know deep down that in reality they are nothing, nothing I tell yee. Hahahaha. STILTON, THE KING OF ALL CHEESES, I tell yee. (And that's just cheeses, don't get me started on puddings and cakes.)

Err, right, I'll continue... the problem with this recipe is that the Stilton (which is the king of cheese in case you didn't know) does not melt right down inside the pitta because pitta's don't stand-up by themselves and so you have to lie them down on the plate while cooking in the microwave... ah but not anymore, I couldn't take the sadness of partial Stilton pitta penetration any longer so I nipped into the workshop and knocked-up a twin pitta bread support (a bit like a two slice toast rack for very fat bread). If you're not already bored, then read-on for a step by step demonstration of making the support and the meal.


First get a bit of wood -- make sure it has not been treated with wood preserver or anyother chemicals. I cut-off a bit of branch from an American Oak log which has been seasoning in the garden for a couple of years.




Then I planed one side of it to form a flat base:-


Then I shaved-off the remaining bark (it's going to be a quick rustic affair because my stomach is rumbling and I want my lunch, but I thought leaving the bark on was going a bit too far)...


Then I cut a couple of capacious slots in the wood, here's first one being made:-



Then a quick sand, and then the initial feasibility test (placing empty pitta breads into the slots)...


Then, for the microwave compatibility test, I put the pitta bread support on a plate (without the pitta breads) into the microwave oven, first for 20 seconds, then for 40 seconds, then for a couple of minutes... ha, it passed the test, no explosions due to trapped moisture, phew. The smell from the microwave was similar to roast chestnuts.

Great, so now to the food. Ever-so slightly wet the outside of the two pitta breads (about one raindrop's quantity of water rubbed-over each side of each pitta bread). Then put'em in your pop-up toaster on a light or medium setting (vitally: long enough to make them puff-up without burning or going hard). Remove them from the toaster straight away after it has popped-up (otherwise they will dry-out and go crispy and brittle making it difficult to open them-up later). Put them on your plate, but don't open them for a couple of minutes because they are full of super-heated steam. Instead prepare your salad stuff.

I put the following vegetation in my pittas:-
  • Green olives from a jar (well rinsed of salt and check for stones),
  • Sweet peppers (with the stork, core and seeds removed) cut-up into short centimetre wide strips,
  • Chillies (with the stork, core and seeds removed) chopped finely.
  • Water cress (cut-up the long stems in particular because it does go a little stringy when cooked).
  • A bit of lettuces.
  • Some blue berries.


Now it's time to cut-open the pittas and stuff'em with stuff. Cut open each one along one of the long edges and open them out so that they make a pocket. (If one of the long edges is sharper than the other, cut along that edge, because the blunt edge of a pitta is better at flexing to take the filling without cracking).



And finally it's ready to be topped by Stilton so that it will melt down over everything....



And into the microwave for 2minutes 40seconds...


All nicely melted, now but still a little on the top, yummy, yummy. Just pick-up with your hands and eat. Yummy, yummy, yummy. Most yummy indeed.