Garrulous Geek

Tuesday. Training. London. Deferred tax, group relief and a hideous test - 38%. Still feeling a bit sick with whatever Alison had. Take the tube at rush hour - silly mistake. Late to meet a friend. Walk into Soho, talk about work. Someone from The View outside a pub. Fish and chip shop. Good fish for central London, my friend tells me. Can't finish mine. Still feeling a bit sick with whatever Alison had. Talk about The Mercury Music Prize and it's arrogant winners. Talk about holidays, families, children, parents, ill grandmother, marriage, tax, David Cameron. Pay for our meal, the price we pay doesn't match the prices on the wall. Get a VAT receipt, claim back every pound spent. Walk further into Soho. Pubs crammed, drinkers on the street. Recognise this area from last evening of drinking with friend. Drunker then. Not drinking much this week. Still feeling sick with whatever Alison had. Find a pub, not too full, strange sign behind the bar - "Where locals come to be insulted". David Beckham's football camp letters on the wall. Gary Neville is his friend, it says here. Talk about the past, where we've come from, old friends, people we have and haven't seen in a long time. Miss the Wirral - why did everyone move away? Uni, jobs, families. Talk about the future. Need a reunion, but life moves on. People busy - jobs, families, children. How permanent are friends? Who will we maintain contact with? See again? People left behind when we move on, replaced by new friends where we arrive. Comparison to an author from the industrial revolution whose name I forget. I don't know much about literature, and my literary journalist friend knows little about tax. Talk about people we just seem to click with, teenage friends. An unspoken understanding. Raised on Nirvana and Harry Enfield, but surely there's more to it than that... Cider too fizzy. Can't finish it. Still feeling sick with whatever Alison had. Time to move on. Leave the pub. Alison calls. My life intruding into the pause we had taken to examine ourselves. Part company. Friend goes home to review things - CDs and books I guess. Promise to meet again soon. Hug, not weird after 17 years of friendship. Walk to Picadilly Circus. Tourists, adverts, statues. An Angus Steak House on every corner. Friends in TGI Fridays. Back to the here and now.

Sunday. Alison's birthday. Present didn't arrive yesterday, Amazon to blame. Early start, Beth hungry at twenty past seven. Warm milk to drink, sat between us in our bed. Porridge, shower, no time for a shave, friend picks me up, drives me to church. Just gone nine. Guitar, tune up. Amplifier, check levels, rest of the band arrives. Practise practise practise practise pray play worship God. Lead guitar on a ten year old song, can anyone even hear me? Service over, hurry home, twenty seven baked potatoes in the oven. Guests late. Friend from church arrives first. Three children. Mother-in-law next. Then more and more and more. New neighbours, old friends. House full. Garden full. Where is the rain? Food for everyone, kids run riot outside. Pudding. More guests. Babies everywhere. Beer, wine. Football lost on the roof. Friend from church's daughter needs the toilet, demands my accompaniment for some reason, friend from church only too happy to have someone else do their dirty work. Potty, poop, good-grief-open-a-window. When in my life did it became normal to wipe a friend's child's bottom? Return child to parent. "This is the second time I've done that, once more and you'll owe me a beer." Only half serious. Rain sets in. Tidy toys away. Kids locked inside, stir crazy. Time to go, leave our house in peace. Tidy up, black bin liner, dishwasher, cup of tea. Rest, reflect.

In my teenage years, I cleared up after drunk vomiting friends at parties. In my twenties, I'm clearing up after my friend's pooping child. I guess life is different, but it stays the same too.

We got back from our holiday in Finland a couple of weeks ago. We had a good time, and it was nice to be able to take Ali and Beth over there to see it, given how many times I've been and how big a part of my history it forms.

I really like being in Finland... it's beautiful and unspoilt. There's forests and lakes and fields everywhere and its so big and wide open. The population density is a low low 15.5 people per square kilometre (thanks Wikipedia). If you do the maths, that means that if you spread people out evenly (a bit difficult due to there being close to 190,000 lakes in the country - that only counts those over 500m^2, the largest being the 5th largest in Europe at 4,308km^2) then you would be 250m from the nearest person. Somehow I like the idea of having that much space around you... Once you get out of the cities and towns, you can be in the proverbial middle of nowhere in about 20 minutes. It's quiet and peaceful, the air is clean, there's minimal light pollution... It's wonderful.

We spent a couple of nights in Helsinki, the capital city, which was nice as I've never really spent much time there. We had a look around the city and spent one day at a zoo that they have on a nearly island. It cost just 10 euros for entry to the zoo and the boat ride to get there, which should be a bargain by anyone's standards. The zoo was pretty good, and I've got quite a few photos in the album that I'll link to later.

After Helsinki, we drove up to Parikkala (note to self - update that Wiki page, or suggest that my mum have a go at it), where my mum grew up. Between drama over the hired car seat for Beth, and Beth's yelling on the 5 hour journey, it was quite a long day, but we got there in the end.

We stayed in a lovely cottage, about 20 minutes drive from where my Grandma's house is. We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The cottage had only just been built and it was extremely nice - very well decked out and extremely comfortable. The place had it's own sauna, which is always enjoyable. We were right by a lake so we could go swimming, although it was pretty shallow around us, so swimming was more an exercise in falling over and making a meal of getting up again.

A couple of our day trips were slightly marred by events out of our control, but we got to see quite a bit of the surrounding area, so that was good. I'd like to go back again, when Beth is a bit older, which would make things on that front a bit easier. We did manage to see Savonlinna (Finnish link, because I'm bored of just linking to wikipedia pages the whole time), spent some time at my aunt and uncles, saw my ill grandma in hospital and went to a nearby nature reserve, though that last trip did involve Alison being extremely startled when an adder crossed her path.

The travelling was OK, though Beth was a bit noisy on the flight there, and very noisy on the flight back. Our trip back involved a 4 hour train journey, which was considerably more pleasant and considerably cheaper (about £80 for the two of us plus Beth) than any 4 hour train journey I've ever been on in England. We got to stay in our own little compartment, with a bit of company from another mum with kid's at one point, and the train even had a play room for kids with a slide and books and stuff. Kudos to VR, Finland's rail network. Apparently you can do stuff like that when you don't privatise your rail industry, and you actually make sensible use of your taxpayer's money, unlike a certain bunch of clowns.

So, all in all it was a good trip. You can see the photos that I've uploaded to Facebook, complete with captions and a bit more explanation of stuff.

I like Finland. Monty Python be damned, it is the country where I want to be. I think I'll learn the language (my initial explorations suggest it is a work of art - logical in ways that please me more than they probably ought) and buy a holiday cottage there. Maybe I'll retire there when I'm older.

When I'm in charge, there's a few offences that will be punishable by swift death. As a little service to you, those of my friends kind enough to read about me here, I am choosing to let you know - ahead of time - what these things are. That way, when I take control, you won't be left trying to plead ignorance in the face of my heavily armed correction squads, for believe me now - ignorance will be no excuse. Read on and take note, for these are the things that you shall not do:

• Drop litter of any variety anywhere except in a bin. This includes spitting chewing gum from your mouth, you savages. I can only imagine that smokers will be particularly hard-hit by this ruling, as they seem to think it their right to drop cigarette butts everywhere they go. Oh well.
• Let your dog crap on the street. Similar to the above, this will also result in a swift execution. As a sidenote - cats will still roam free and may still defecate in your garden. You may not like this, but you can whine about that when you successfully depose me from my seat of power and take charge of the country.
• Leave used tea bags in the sink. Words fail me sometimes, they really do. Put it in the damn bin. Good grief.
• Play music at an offensively loud volume in your house, such that I am forced to listen to it while relaxing in my garden.
• As above, for music played in a car or other motor vehicle.
• As above, for music played on your mobile phone while walking down the street. This problem is only compounded by the fact that you're probably listening to R&B. Luckily for you I've not yet made bad musical taste a capital crime, but you have been warned.
• Drive a car that has been "modded" with an absurd exhaust. No one thinks your mum's Clio has a V8 engine, no matter how loud it is. You better hope it's modded to withstand sustained RPG fire.
• Swear in public, especially in earshot of children. Just shut up, huh? No one wants to hear you punctuating your sentences with the f-word.
• Engage in any unsolicited marketing activity, including but no limited to spamming, cold calling, junk-faxing, pop-ups and spyware.
• Sell crap food. For example: Nescafe is not coffee; sausages should contain meat that wasn't pressure hosed off the carcass; hydrogenated vegetable fat is not a valid substitute for the cream in ice cream; low fat yoghurt is a travesty; citric acid, sugar and carbonated water do not constiture lemonade; Sunny Delight and Fruit Shoot are revolting. We'll eat real food when I'm the boss.
• Stop on double yellow lines to use a cash machine or similar. You may get lucky and simply find your car stolen while you get your money, but I wouldn't chance it.
• Show off your underwear. Now, some people think that women showing off thongs is sexy. I am not one of these people. I don't want to see it, and you will stop showing it to me. There are extremely rare occasions on which underwear on display can be highly intriguing, and this will be permitted, but 99 times out of 100 it is just plain ugly. I am, however, prepared to act as judge, jury and executioner in these borderline cases.
• Write truly terrible song lyrics. Recent offender: Fergie's track "Big girls don't cry" includes the line "And I'm gonna miss you, like a child misses his blanket." Not only is this line unwieldy and tenuous, but the next line shockingly fails to find anything to rhyme with blanket. Seriously, just shut up.

I'm sure there are more things that will spring to mind once I oust Gordon from No. 10 in my impending coup, but I think that's enough planning for now. I trust you all feel better informed. Tread carefully.

Answer me this, if you can...

Are the majority of women so easily manipulated that they will buy a perfume "endorsed" by Sarah Jessica Parker - a woman who almost certainly had no hand in designing it or manufacturing it, but was in fact just paid a wedge of cash to be photographed holding it - believing that by wearing said perfume they will somehow attain the style, success and sex appeal of the fictional character that she played in Sex And The City?

I hate advertising. The sooner Boots take down those 10 foot tall posters of her ridiculous grinning face, the more pleasant my walk to work will be.

I've probably mentioned it before, but I find it tough to buy CDs. I'm usually pretty short for cash, and I tend to buy everything second hand on ebay, but I still have to be really selective in what I pick up. I hate to feel like I'm wasting any money on non-essential things like music or games or whatever, because money isn't exactly abundant...

I get frustrated trying to pick CDs, because it's so hard to find anything that really grabs me - something really outstandingly different or inspired or inspiring or even just really impressively talented. I listen to the radio most days, and while I love the variety of music, there's just so little that I'd ever actually buy and listen to again once I got bored of hearing it on the radio. Sure, the Kaiser Chiefs are pretty good, and the lyrics are quite smart, but is the music really any more impressive than anything I've heard before? Yes, Flourescent Adolescent by the Arctic Monkeys is a great single now that you mention it, but I don't care about the rest of their work because it all just sounds deliberately grimy and underproduced, and apart from the drumming they don't sound wonderfully talented - more like they were just in the right place at the right time. Hey There Delilah by the Plain White Tees is a beautiful acoustic number, but wouldn't I be better just buying a Simon & Garfunkel best of? Hell, even that Kate Nash single is pretty catchy, but I hate Lily Allen so that probably wouldn't work out too well. There's even the odd dance track here and there that's good, but I can't listen to an album of that, God help me.

The only band that's really grabbed me of late are The White Stripes, and that's probably only because it's the first time I've been exposed to any blues music. Even then, though, I'll probably just buy up their back catalogue and won't venture further than that.

So, in a bid to widen my horizons, I turned to... Amazon. Perhaps their recommendations would be able to inspire me? So I sat and browsed the list, let it know I already owned a few things it was suggesting, and then had a look at what remained...

Well, as I like Electric Light Orchestra, I'm apparently supposed to want to buy something by Wizzard or Prefab Sprout. Hmm. This is not off to a flying start...

Ooh, here we go, something that got recommended because I like Belle & Sebastian, that might work. Oh, it's Isobel Campbell's solo album after she quit the band due to breaking up with the lead singer. Sorry, no sale, I don't think that's going to work. There's a slew of other bands from Glasgow, but again I'm not sure that's the best criteria on which to suggest CDs.

Ugh... Oasis albums, recommended because I like Blur. As someone who was around at the time, this seems quite ironic.

Pantera, because I like Rage Against The Machine; Keane and Kasabian because I like Muse; endless Ben Folds records; Enya records because I bought my dad one of her albums as a present years ago... It's probably just a mercy that Amazon doesn't know I like Green Day and Blink 182 or I'd be wading through NOFX albums and other "real" punk that I'm really not into. This isn't working for me.

Sure, a couple of albums turn up that I might look into, but there's far more that I definitely am not interested in.
It all seems to be borne out of people buying 3 albums that happened to be released in the same week, and people like me buying up a bands entire back catalogue such that everyone else is expected to own all their records on the basis that they bought one 10 years ago.

In the end I got fed up and bought a Kanye West album. Rap music. Not exactly home territory - certainly something different. And sure, the albums got some good singles and a couple of other good bits on there, and he's very talented in his field, but it's just not something I can access terribly easily. The swearing that I can handle on a Green Day record bugs me here, and every other word seems to be nigger, which will probably always be a bit weird for my white ears to listen to.

Time to crawl back to another damn guitar band...

J.K. Rowling has some brilliant ideas. The world she has constructed over the course of seven books is full of imagination and is brimming with detail. Huge amounts of thought has gone into the world she has created. The characters and their situations are exciting and compelling. From a purely conceptual point of view, the stories are brilliant.

The downside, however, is that J.K. Rowling is a truly terrible writer. Her sentence structure is terrible - rambling all over the place. The characters dialogue is truly terrible at times. She clearly owns a "word of the day" book, as the same words turn up several times in the space of a few pages, then disappear without trace. She is prone to waffling and filling the books with tedious back story, then skipping over other details from the past books in the blink of an eye, leaving you groping for the relevance of something, wondering whether you can really bothered to dig out a copy of the old book in question, or at least search Wikipedia to figure out what she's talking about.

The book is badly written, and was also clearly badly proof-read - probably in a bid to minimise the risk of this sort of thing. For someone with a decent understanding of the English language and how it should be written - a group I would like to think I belong to - the book is positively frustrating at times, such is it's poor quality of writing.

It is quite the dichotomy... The story is brilliant. The writing is terrible. I felt like I was having to compromise or compensate in reading it - letting Rowling off for her writing on the basis that the story and the ideas were just so good. I wonder whether Rowling might have been better off dictating her ideas and the story to someone more capable, and letting them write it for her, or at least just getting a decent editor to sort out the more glaring problems.

Still, I loved the series start to finish, and she's made a tidy pile of cash, so I doubt anyone can really be that bothered by it.

On a related note, the films have been similarly frustrating, but for different reasons. The stories have benefited from their transition to the silver screen, presumably because the screenwriters have had to condense the story to a manageable length. The special effects are pretty special, and some of the acting is brilliant. The problem? Well, it is quite simply that some of the acting is terrible. Dear goodness, it's painful at times. The reason being - they're a bunch of kids! Sure, they're hitting their stride a bit more now that they're five films in, but even so it's still pretty patchy. There are many scenes that are carried by the abundantly capable adult cast (and what a cast - Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Ralph Fiennes, Imelda Staunton... I could go on) which is all well and good, but for the fact that the story centres around the kids who just can't act all that well. Once again, I was compromising and letting them get away with it because the effects were just too cool and the rest of the acting just too good.

Book? Great story, terrible writing.

Film? Great to watch, terrible acting.

Still, this is what one puts up with sometimes when one partakes of mainstream entertainment... Said the snobbish grammar Nazi.

Join me next time, when I will be complaining about the idiocy of letting a fancy database decide what CDs I should be buying.

Finally... I've managed to get at the draft post I prepared, writing about Beth's birthday... Here you go:

It was baby Beth's first birthday last month. It was good fun. We opened presents:

She got some Duplo, a cuddly rabbit, a sandpit, a little toy thing to play with in the bath, some money... and other bits and bobs.

We went and fed the ducks and geese at the nature reserve in the morning, which was fun, except the geese were proper fierce and kept pecking and nipping us. I had to put Beth on my shoulders to stop them eating her little toes, mischievous beasties that they are.

In the afternoon we went into Manchester and went on the big ferris wheel thing that they have there at the moment. It was a bit scary as it goes up really high, not that it phased Beth in the least! Here's some photos:

After we'd been on the big wheel we went to Cafe Rouge for supper. We had a good time and enjoyed the meal. Beth had a pretty good time too. Here she is eating:

Alison had made a carrot cake so we took a slice along with a candle and had that at the restaurant too. Here's some pictures, including a group picture as taken by the very helpful waiter:

So, Beth had a good birthday. Hurray!

I've not been up to much really, as one might expect. I've been sleeping a lot, even during the day which is very unusual for me. It's not been terribly satisfying sleep though. I can't eat much either, so that's quite rubbish. It's pretty much soup or soup, though Alison did make a very nice vegetable curry yesterday that I was able to eat.

I'm supposed to be going to London on training next week, assuming I'm well enough. I'll have to see how I'm doing on Sunday I guess.

As I have mentioned several times before, I have had a little cyst in my mouth for a while. Well, not strictly in my mouth - technically it was between the palates at the roof of my mouth and the ceiling of bone above them.

The cyst has now been removed. I spent six hours in hospital yesterday, two of them under general anaesthetic, and probably about half an hour or so with doctors cutting my mouth open. I now have a somewhat noticeably larger mouth, which makes sense as they said from the x-rays a while ago that the cyst was probably about the size of a 10p piece in diameter. I also have a whole bunch of stitches in my mouth, which I can best describe as starting midway to the back of my palate, then being "braided" through my palate, then coming through my gums above my teeth and being tied off in front of my teeth. Weird.

I came home about two 'o' clock yesterday and have been pretty much just resting since then. I'm off work until Thursday, so that's OK. I can't eat anything too hot or too cold, or even anything too solid at the moment. Alison has made a big pot of chicken noodle soup and we've got plenty of Weeatbix and the like in as well, so I should get by. I've been feeling pretty tired, which is probably the anaesthetic wearing off, and may also be due to the antibiotics and strong painkillers I've got to take. Still, it's not nearly as bad as when I had my wisdom teeth out, so that's a mercy.

Right. Lunch awaits, so I shall be off. Just letting you all know it went OK. Bye for now.

Well, I was going to write about Beth's birthday, but the draft of that entry is on my laptop at work, so it'll have to wait till Thursday when I'm next in the office. Still, this entry is tangentially birthday related, so that'll have to do for now.

Beth was given some Duplo Lego for her birthday, so I've been playing with that with her. Well, I say playing... what happens is that I build things and she demolishes them, usually before i'm even done building them. Still, it's good fun, and I'm sure she'll get the hang of the building side of things in due course.

It has, as it goes, reminded me how much I used to enjoy my Lego. So, last weekend when I was at my parents, I headed up into their loft to fetch down some of my old Technic Lego. I have spent the past few evenings, with Alison's help, building this beauty: