a time to every purpose...

I've been thinking a bit about getting older. 

One of the things they never tell you about growing up is that at no point in your life do you actually feel as though you've grown up.  I wouldn't go back to being seventeen again for any money in the world, but at the same time, I still find it a little difficult to believe that I'm apparently now a forty-three year old man. When did that happen?

I'm not really sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I suppose I still don't really know. At one point, as a very young child, I remember being dead-set on becoming a motorcycle policeman (which would have had to be over my father's dead body: as a doctor who attended more than his share of road traffic accidents, he naturally wasn't that keen to have any of his children on a motorbike.  A few years later, I completed one of those career advisory questionnaire things and it suggested that I should give serious consideration to a career as a zoo keeper. 

Frankly, I was as surprised and disappointed as anyone that I ended up in a career in IT.

Still, it does look like I've always quite liked hats and animals.

I think I'm really styling out that cowboy hat, to be honest.  I'd totally wear that outfit again.

And yes, that guitar is upside-down and no, I wasn't some kind of lost, teenage troubadour.  Yes, that comic is upside-down too.  It must just be how I roll.

On the train on the way home from London last night, we were joined in our carriage at Leicester by a teenager,  He took the opportunity of a sparsely populated train to park himself in first class to plug in his phone and make use of the free WiFi.  Rather than be amazed at the fact that he was able to charge his phone and connect to the internet on a train at all, he was more concerned and irritated by the fact that the connection wasn't quite reliable enough for him to have a Facetime chat with his friends.  Isn't it amazing how quickly things change and just as amazing how quickly they're taken for granted? The same youth also didn't seem to be able to afford a belt for his trousers.  I appreciate that it's the entire purpose of fashion to confuse and anger the older generation.... but really?

*looks again at the pictures above*

Yeah.  He's fine.

centerfold...

I've had some post from the MS Trust.

It's a little pamphlet suggesting ways that you can raise money to support what is a very worth charity indeed.  My wife is a trustee now, you know. There's a Survival skills weekend, a Grand Canyon Trek, an Alps Trek, an Iceland Trek, a Sahara Trek, a Great Wall of China Trek, a Kilimanjaro Trek... lots of Treks.

Don't fancy that? How about cycling? You can cycle London to Paris, the Prudential Ride London-Surrey 100, London to Brighton, the MS Circuit Challenge at Goodwood.

No? How about skydiving, a reindeer rally, attending a massive garden party, baking a cake for a Christmas Cake Off or maybe just painting yourself blue?  It's all here.

What about running?  Well,  let's see: you can do the British 10k London Run, the Great North Run.....

....oh, wait a minute.... what's this?

Oh man.  That guy gets everywhere.

But you know, there's a reminder in the back of the booklet about why we do these things:

"Because we receive no government funding, we rely on our supporters to fund our vital work.  People like you, who donate or take part in events like the ones in this brochure, contribute one third of our total income.  All the pennies, all the pounds you collect by running, cycling, partying or baking, really add up.

"The funds you raise will make a difference today for people living with MS.  You could help fund a new MS nurse for people who are currently having to manage MS alone.

"You could help train and support every MS specialist nurse in the UK to make a difference for hundreds of thousands of people with MS.

"And you could help to make sure that there's reliable, trustworthy information available to help everyone with MS make decisions that are right for them."

And as Lucy says here, you have a chance to prove that love for life can prevail over illness.

More power to them, I say.  All of the runners, cyclists, trekkers, bakers, jumpers.... the whole damn lot of them.

pictures of you....

My friend Tony is something of a photography buff, and he took many fantastic photos documenting our time in Scarborough (his wife is in the choir, Tony spent his time wandering around the town taking photos of whatever and whoever took his fancy). Because of his wife’s involvement as a singer, Tony has sort of become the choir’s unofficial photographer, snapping pictures of us as we sing at various concerts.

He took an excellent picture of me at our concert in Bolsover, just at the point in the Motown Medley where the basses and tenors have put on their sunglasses to sing “Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

A colleague of mine liked this so much that she bounded up to me when I was next in the office to show me that she had installed it at the background picture on her new phone. In fact, it was the only photo on her phone.

OK. Fair enough, I suppose. Apparently I lasted 24 hours, which with this girl’s attention span is probably something of a miracle.

Tony took another great picture of me in Scarborough this weekend, but when I got back to work, this same girl didn’t seem impressed:

“It doesn’t look like you”
“What do you mean it doesn’t look like me?”
“Your eyes look all black and you don’t have black eyes. You have blue eyes”
“Yes, but it’s a black and white photograph”
“It doesn’t look like you and I don’t like it”

Everyone's a critic.

(I don't want your) photograph....

Do you remember that website from way back in the day where a guy called Eric attempted to convey any requested emotion? Pity, horror, love, bemused resignation, indifference, kill.... that kind of thing.

Well, get your thinking caps on and let me know what emotion you think this guy is conveying.

It was taken by my friend Tony in Sheffield the other day when we were up there for the Bevox Rocks concert (He's a keen and very talented photographer, but I was happily quite elusive from his camera for the most of the day and during the actual performance itself, but he did manage to catch me here, it seems)

I'm going for "mildly perplexed"....

my body is your body, I won't tell anybody....

A good friend of mine put up a post on Facebook today:
“I just saw a quote on a photo of a beautiful plus-sized girl calling her “a real-sized model.” Because it’s not enough that slender models are insufficiently womanly, they now apparently DON’T EXIST”

She elaborated in the comments: “If I may, and this could be controversial so I have my apology ready, I would compare it to racism against white people: there IS such a thing as thin privilege, which makes it ‘okay’ (in some people’s minds) to be utterly horrid to thin people….slender=vain, superficial, overly self-controlled. Fat=lazy, slovenly, undisciplined, can’t stop eating. I had a stranger in the pub once poke me in the ribs, exclaim ‘what a side on that one!’ and then advise me to ‘stop eating hamburgers’. This was when I was running 5km five or six times a week.”

I kind of know what she means. I’m pretty thin, and plenty of people feel the need to advise me to eat more, because if I’m not constantly reminded, I might forget. Some people go further and feel the need to give me a poke, as if their touch will somehow drive home the point that I’m too thin. Most of these people mean well, but no matter how well they might think they know me, absolutely none of them have any idea of my own body image or the how I see myself or how hurtful some of these remarks might be. Larger people sometimes seem to view my build as a criticism of their own.

Body image is a very strange, personal thing. I have a vivid memory of being about eight or nine years old and having an older boy at school wrinkling his nose in disgust when my backside wobbled as I towelled myself off in the changing rooms after gym. I doubt he meant anything much by it, but from that moment on, I had an image of myself as being big. Of course, at around 6’5” in height, I grew to be tall, but my experience of growing up was that I always needed to have bigger clothes than everyone else: my school shorts were “chunky fit” and I needed a bigger cap than everyone else at cubs. Maybe that all makes sense now that I am simply taller than most people (after all, puppies have huge paws), but that was actually quite difficult to deal with when I was still actually growing up. I have weighed over 100kg at my heaviest, but even now I’m more than 20kg lighter, I still find it incredibly difficult to see myself as thin, and still find it weird when people tell me that’s how they see me.

In nineteen days’ time, my wife and I will be running the London Marathon. My wife ran 22 miles with me on Sunday and will complete the full 26.2 miles of the race when the time comes. She’s done brilliantly with the training and she looks great on it too. She might not be able to fit into her boots any more, thanks to her newly developed calf muscles, but everyone has been telling her how great she looks. And yet, and yet…. She seems mildly disappointed that the scales are telling her that she hasn’t actually lost any weight. What’s the point of all this bloody training, she half-jokes, if I’m not going to lose any weight? As if the ability to run a marathon and raise thousands of pounds for a brilliant charity *and* looking great are somehow not enough.

Your own body image is a funny thing, and whenever and however it got set, it’s clearly not a straightforward thing for people to re-programme.

reflect what you are, in case you don't know....

Apparently, I look like Steve Jobs.

On Friday, I went out for a drink with a couple of colleagues. It was a pleasant affair, made all the more pleasant when we were joined by our respective partners. My wife managed to make room in her busy schedule between her pole fitness class and her evening of fencing to swing by for a quick drink. I was wearing a black long-sleeved t-shirt, and this seemed to hasten the comparison with Jobs. One of my colleagues remarked that, when he first joined the company a year ago, I came to do a presentation to him and to the other new starters. All, I’m told, were beside themselves from the moment I walked into the room by my similarity to the late co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple.

This comparison had never occurred to my wife, who now looked across the table at me with an appraising eye:

“He does! “ [googles a picture of Steve Jobs on her phone and holds it up to my face for comparison] “He really does! If he still wore glasses, he’d look even more like him too…”

OK. Bald, bearded, greying and wearing a black t-shirt. That’s all it takes for you people? Or did you factor in my obvious charisma and far-sighted genius?

Personally, I’ve always seen myself as more of a Steve Wozniak kind of a guy….

No?

Also, who does that thing with their thumb on their chin?

What is that?

---

In the course of researching this post*, I discovered that Steve Jobs was 1m 88cm tall.  For some reason, I imagined him to be a lot shorter than that.  He was shorter than me by a good 10cm, but that's still pretty tall by almost anyone's standards.  Also, poor Woz: destined to always be the Josh Gad to Jobs' Ashton Kutcher.

* Yes, I research posts.  Laugh it up!

don't leave me dry...

I was out on Friday with some of my colleagues. Towards the end of the evening, one of those colleagues – someone that I’ve worked reasonably closely with for the last five years but who is leaving to take another role – turned to me and said that she found me almost impossible to read because I was so dry. She went on to say that she was actually convinced that I didn’t like her at all.

In actual fact, I do like her, and I told her so.  She was a little surprised, I think.

I first worked with her in around 2009 when she had just joined the business and was very impressed.  As it happens, I told her, I wrote you some feedback on our work together at the time, and I found that I still had that very same feedback on my computer only the other day.  She had absolutely no recollection of this feedback at all but was intrigued about what I might have said, so I promised her that I would send it to her the next time I was in the office.

I looked it up on Monday and had a read before sending it on. I was pretty nice (as an aside, I’m always pretty nice in feedback. I know that our environment can be a pretty thankless place at the best of times, so I try to go out of my way to provide written feedback to the people I think have done a good job and may not otherwise be thanked). Amongst various specific points about her contribution to the project we were working on, I said:

“She’s been a real pleasure to work with, and approaches every problem with a smile on her face and a desire to move things forwards.”

I meant it too. Five years later and in a completely different job role, she still displays those traits. I told her so and she seemed quite moved, I think mostly because she’s carried this image around in her head that I’m this icy, remote, critical figure and to know that I actually like her and think she does a good job seems like real praise indeed....although, to be fair, this was quite late in the evening after a long and emotional last day for her.

Actually, I’m a teddy bear. Everyone knows that, don’t they? Why on earth do people think I’m dry?

[looks it up]

“ …in which humour is presented without a change in emotion or body language. It is usually spoken in a casual, monotone, or cantankerous voice, and expresses a calm, sincere, or grave demeanour, often in spite of the ridiculousness of the subject matter. This delivery is called dry humour or dry wit."

….oh, I see.

all about me...

Some years ago, I installed a widget that enabled me to track visitors to these humble pages.  It's not that I'm obsessively interested in every person who may be passing by on their way to somewhere much more interesting, or that I'm vain enough to want to graph my readership and compulsively try and work out what sort of content drives the traffic*....

*You guys like cats, right?  Everyone on the internet likes cats.

...I was just curious.

I check them once in a while, but when you use song lyrics for your post titles, you quickly learn that you get a lot of traffic from Google that basically isn't interested in what I have to say in the slightest.

Just recently though, these stats have become even less interesting than usual.  I write about all kinds of random stuff here and always have, so the referring search terms have always been a bit off-the-wall.  Here's the current selection:

-> girls in wetsuits flickr
-> over night bondage stories
-> skinny cheap monday jeans sagging
-> stunting in my onesie

I think I can work out the first one okay, but the rest?  What the hell are monday jeans and is it a thing that if you buy the cheap ones that they sag?  Why are those people being sent here? Are they finding whatever it is that they need?  Is that code?

Perhaps the answer lies in the referring sites: apart from Google itself (US, UK and Canadian versions - most of my visitors come from these beautiful countries.  Thank you all!), all of the other sites that send traffic here seem to be exclusively from either Russia or Romania. They look like the kind of sites that stream video or something like that, and no doubt probably infect your computer with more viruses than you can shake a stick at.  Why on earth are they linking here?

Well, the principle of Occam's Razor states that when there are multiple possible explanations, then you should always choose the simplest.  So with that in mind, I've decided that they must just be fans.  I'm not a vain man, but for each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there is always an infinite number of possible and more complex alternatives, because one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypothesis to prevent them from being falsified; therefore, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are better testable and falsifiable.

So they're definitely fans, then.

Well then, a massive buna! to my Romanian visitors and привет to my Russian guests.  In case you haven't already worked it out since you arrived, you won't find much streaming video here, but I'm an inclusive kind of a guy, so pretty much everyone is welcome here.

Yeah.  Maybe I should just ignore the stats and continue wittering on about whatever pops into my head without a thought for a possible audience.  It's worked for the last ten years, right?

 ....if by 'worked' we actually mean 'successfully shouted nonsense into the void'.

I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs....

Ten years ago today, on a whim, I started a weblog.  I was twenty-nine years old.

Ten years represents 25% of my entire life, and some things have changed a lot in that time: I've got married, been diagnosed with a chronic, incurable illness, travelled around the world, eaten a tarantula, got a cat, installed wireless internet, bought my first mac, grown a beard....

Other things have hardly changed at all: I'm living in the same house, I work at the same place (albeit in a completely different job), I still listen to lots of music and do a lot of running....

I'm probably not the right person to ask about whether or not I've changed much as a person in that time.  If I had to guess, I'd probably say both yes and no.  Still, let's look back at that first ever tentative foray into blogging and see if we can discern anything about me from there:

Tuesday March 02, 2004
Well, this is my first ever entry.
Not quite sure what plans I have for this blogspot, but I guess we'll find that out as we go along. I've sort of been thinking about this for ages, and now I'm taking the plunge. Here we go then.

Thoughts for the day:
(1) Oh shit - I forgot to buy 30th Birthday presents for 2 of my friends who are up for a shared 30th bash this weekend
(2) Thank you Amazon!

G'f is away today. It's sort of hard to settle without her. Haven't been able to concentrate on the TV (University Challenge, Nevermind the Buzzcocks) or on my book (The Amulet of Samarkand - Jonathan Stroud). When I'm finished here I think I'll wash up, do some ironing (oh how domestic) and then try the book again.

Hm. I'm sure it will get more interesting than this.

Well.  Those two friends and I all turn forty in the next week or so, and I haven't got them presents for that yet either... so no change there (and I could well use Amazon when I do finally get around to it).  My wife will probably laugh at the idea that I ever did the washing up or the ironing, but she's away a lot more now and I still find it harder to settle when she's not around.

I especially love the charmingly naive belief that somehow my blogging would get more interesting over time.  Well, 2398 posts over 3652 days, who knows how many hundreds of thousands of words, and no sign of it yet!

You never know though, do you?  Maybe over the next ten years.....

A decade of blogging!  Good grief.  Who would have thought it?

heavy words are so lightly thrown...

Given that the tenth anniversary of this blog is in less than a month's time, it's probably a little bit late to start wondering what would happen if some of the stuff on here got out into the public domain.  It's already out in the public domain, of course.... just because I could probably count the regular readers on the fingers of one hand, doesn't mean that everything on this site - including a vast archive of fascinating posts on an enormous breadth of subjects -  isn't available to any passing browser (from the look of my stats, that's an increasingly large number of people from random websites in Russia, Romania and China).  What I mean is if it became more widely known that I was the author of this blog; that.....

**flourish as I pull off my mask and step out from behind the curtain**

.....I am Swisslet.

**tiny, sad trumpet noise and single cymbal crash**

I don't really make a secret of who I am here, and the avatar is really only a thin figleaf to prevent casual googling, but neither do I really advertise the connection.  Many of my friends know about this; some of my family know; my wife's family know; one or two of my colleagues know.... and that's about it.  As far as I know, people don't walk past me in the office fully up to speed with my thoughts on beard grooming because they've read some of my many posts on the subject.  I quite like it that way.   I'd be lying if I said I don't self-censor myself here, because I do and because there are some subjects that I just don't touch at all.  On the other hand, I do not really feel the pressure from anyone else about what I should or should not be writing about.  I don't write all that much about my job, but I do occasionally tell stories about things that happen there, and over the course of the last eighteen months or so, I've vented my frustrations about my last boss.  How would I feel if those thoughts were more widely known in the office?  Is it even possible to damage my already-stillborn career any further?

To be brutally honest, the simple truth is that most people simply won't care.  My experience tells me that, even amongst some of my dearest friends, their willingness to read every one of the lovingly crafted words here is somewhat limited.  Most check in from time to time, I think... but very few read on a regular basis.  I think the same would likely be true of my colleagues at work.  If you remember, I actually kept a separate blog when we were travelling in 2010, copied all the posts from here to there, and publicised the link to my colleagues so they could follow us as we travelled the world.  I don't think very many people followed the link, and if they did, then their interest in photos of me on the other side of the world was somewhat limited.  If they found out about this place, I suspect that there might be an initial interest, but even with handy tagging to take you to all the interesting bits, there are more than two thousand posts on here, and the only person that interested in what I think is me.  In fact, probably not even me.  I'm not vain enough to assume anything different.

Would it matter if more people connected me to this blog?  Probably not.  I'm sure there are things on here that I might regret writing and would rather weren't dragged out of context and into the daylight.  On the whole though, what you see here is what you get: opinions and feelings honestly given.  Take it or leave it.  I like the act of writing and I mainly write to clear my mind and for the discipline of structuring my thoughts into sentences, but perhaps it would be nice to have more of an audience.  I guess my only worry might be embarrassing someone else.... specifically my wife, but also anyone else identifiable by proxy through me.

What do you think?  Is there anything on here that I (or anyone else) should be worried about if word got out?  You might think this is another sign of my impending midlife crisis, but I've been wondering about being less coy about the ownership of this blog, for example when I write elsewhere about my MS.  Should I worry?  Is anyone really likely to care?

Your thoughts please.......

big star overnight....

At the beginning of March 2014, I will have been blogging for ten years.  In all that time, and in spite of the millions and millions of words I have gifted spewed onto the Internet and my obvious talent and star quality, I haven't exactly been inundated with interview requests.  Or book deals.

Never mind.  The worm may finally be about to turn.  I have just been featured over at Uborka!

If you want to find out my views on where I am living, why I grew a beard, my most satisfying achievement of the last seven years and why I feel like a musical fraud, then you'd best make your way over there now and read the article:

Where are they now? An Interview with Swisslet

One of the things that I've learned from doing this is that it seems that my 2009 identity switch from SwissToni to Swisslet apparently confused a few people who wondered where I had gone.  Maybe there's a massive nostalgia market just waiting for a SwissToni comeback?  Or maybe I've been around so long that I'm finally coming into fashion?

Hmm.  Perhaps not.

Well, regardless.  I now await the arrival of my book deal with a renewed sense of anticipation.

Thanks to Karen and Pete for having me, and thanks to Gordon for tagging me and asking the questions.  It's a splendid website anyway, so if you haven't discovered them yet, then you should get yourself over there forthwith! (The most recent post, "Safeguarding" is fantastic, for starters.  "In here [the Internet], shy people can be gregarious, anti-social people can make friends, people having a hard time can get support, people can find out that there’s a name for the way they feel and that they’re not the only one to feel it."  Beautifully put.)

over and over.....

I saw Daniel Kitson performing on Sunday.  He was excellent.  I love the fact that he's a stand up who:
a) Sat down for the whole duration of the show behind a desk on the stage
b) Doesn't talk down to his audience.  At all.  He's not afraid to toss out ideas and thoughts and theories that assume that you are basically an intelligent human being and will be able to follow.  You actually have to concentrate on what he's saying for the best part of two hours with no interval.  I really like that.  He's not above the odd knob gag, obviously....but frankly, who is?

Anyway.  The show was about lots of things, but one idea that has stuck in my head was about memory.  Kitson talked about how strange it is when someone has a memory of you that you don't remember at all.  He also talked about how no one, even two people who were in the same place and saw the same thing, will have the same memory of anything.  I love this kind of stuff, and it's one of the reasons that I really enjoyed studying history... the simple, but mind-blowing, idea that there is no such thing as a FACT.

FACT.

Anyway.  I digress.  When musing about the nature of memory, Kitson theorised that our memories are not actually little freeze-frames of an event in our lives, forever frozen in time exactly as they happened, but instead they are living things that are constantly changing and evolving.  In other words, we remember these things because we keep thinking about them and giving them a polish, and that in the act of polishing them before putting them back into storage, they are subtly changed over time.

That's an interesting idea.  Is it true?  No idea.  But what I do know is that I'm starting to get the same sense about this blog.  I've been writing this now since early 2004.  That's a long time.  You tell me, but I do sometimes get the impression that I'm telling you the same stories over and over again.... with the memory of that event getting subtly changed each time I tell it.  In my head, I was convinced that I saw Iron Maiden when they played at Donington in 1988, but when I wrote about it the other day, something made me check and it turns out that I actually saw them play there in 1992.  I had to go back over the post and correct some of the chronology, not to mention deal with the fact that I'd written the whole post around the assumption that I'd seen the band when they were touring "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son" and not "Fear of the Dark".  Dammit.

So what?  Memory can play tricks on you, right?  Yes of course, but whenever I sit down and write about how I first started listening to The Smiths (or feeling fat or whatever), I get this creeping sensation that I've probably told this exact same story here before.  Slightly differently.  Broadly the same, I'm sure, with most of the key points appearing the same every time, but each time I put metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper to write about that event again, I'm probably moving my own memory further away from what actually happened.

Is that a big deal?  Not really.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter at all.  In fact, it's mildly interesting to see how my OWN perspective on an event in my life is shifting.... but you will tell me if I start to bore you though, right?  If I'm repeating myself incessantly and telling you about ever-more-fictional events in my own life, then you will let me know, won't you?  I don't mind it when a TV programme starts with a quick recap of what's happened so far to bring you up to speed, but that's not a TV show in its own right, is it?

I'm beginning to bore myself, and that's never a good sign.

Monkey.  Minature Cymbal.  That's me.

wishing I was skinny....

There was an advert on the TV a little while ago - for Dove, I think. I’ll let the Guardian describe the premise:

“The ad follows a forensic artist, one of those people who draws crime suspects based on witnesses' descriptions. In this case, he draws facial portraits of several women based solely on what they tell him. He can't see them. Then he draws pictures of the same women based on what people who have only interacted with them for a short while describe. In almost every case, there's a stark difference between the two images of each woman. The self-described portraits are uglier, sadder and almost sour-looking in some instances”

[you can watch the advert there too, if you're interested.]

The idea, I suppose was to show how our own mental image of ourselves is often a lot more negative than the reality.

I mention this because I’ve recently been forced to consider my own view of my body. Since I was about 7 years old, I’ve always had a view that I’m fat. I think this came from the simple fact that from around then, I started to be bigger than average. Hardly surprising really, given that I’ve ended up nearly two meters tall, but it’s incredibly damaging to a seven year old to have legs too big to fit into an average pair of shorts and to be forced to wear something with the magnificent label of “chunky shorts”. Since then, I’ve generally struggled to find off-the-peg clothes that really fit me because they’re cut for the average person and I’m not built like the average person. That shit stays with you.

By the time I was at University, I was fully grown but was also pretty hefty – a good six or seven stone heavier than I am now. I’m big and I have broad shoulders, so my frame hid the heft pretty effectively, but I was still a pretty substantial physical presence. Not fat, I don’t think, but my mental template was already fixed. Ironically, I was actually even nicknamed “Chunk” for a while.

I’ve lot a LOT of weight since then. My ribs show and everything; you can see the muscles in my stomach. I’m long and lean, but I still immediately reject it when people say that I am skinny. It’s simply not the way that I see myself and I probably never will, no matter how much weight I lose (and I’m lighter now than at any point in my life since I was a teenager, I think). I actually had someone ask me if I was still trying to lose weight the other day. I’m not, but she was marvelling at the enthusiasm with which I told her that the banana bread I was eating was entirely fat free. I eat it because I like it and it tastes good, but the way I describe it makes it sound like I’m dieting.

My MS is challenging my perception of myself too: I already knew that the muscles in my arms and shoulders are wasted to some extent (that’s one of the reasons I swim), but the specialist pointed out to me last week that my left thigh is noticeably less well muscled than the right due to wasting, and I’m gradually being forced to face up to the physical toll the disease is taking on my body too.

I’ve been bumping into a friend of C’s at the gym quite a lot recently. We’re reasonably friendly, so we tend to have a laugh about how we always seem to meet half-naked in the changing-rooms or up by the swimming pool, and rarely fully-clothed. But who doesn't enjoy meeting someone they know on the side of the swimming pool, eh?  Not at all awkward.  Anyway.  C had coffee with this guy the other day, and as she was talking to him about my bio-mechanical woes, muscle wastage etc. and how it’s all affecting my running, he remarked, “Yes, I could see at the pool that he was looking a bit spindly”

A bit spindly? I’m still struggling to adjust to the idea that I’m not fat. But spindly?

Who wants to look a bit spindly?

the fallen angel watching you...

You know that feeling when you hear something that gives you a real jolt and you suddenly realise how old you are getting? Usually this happens to me when I’m foolish enough to make idle small talk with my colleagues at work. I’m terrible at small talk, but in the interests of filling a potentially awkward silence, I might innocently ask someone how their kids are doing:

“Oh, Leah is now fifteen…..”
At this point, my eyes will widen in horror as I realise that I can remember when this guy had the time off work for Leah’s birth. Which means that not only have a whole fifteen years passed, but they’ve passed with me working with a lot of the same people.

 Fifteen years!

This morning I heard that “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” is twenty-five years old this month. A quarter of a century! What?!  There's a good article about it on the Quietus here (cheers for the link, Mark)

When it was released in April 1988, I had just turned fourteen. Barely months before, I had bought myself a cassette copy of “The Number of the Beast”. This was a big deal. My music collection at the time either consisted of things that I’d taped off the chart show on radio one or a handful of cassettes. Actually, if I think about it, I reckon I could name them all in order of acquisition:

Kings of the Wild Frontier – Adam Ant
The Riddle – Nik Kershaw
Human Racing – Nik Kershaw
Scoundrel Days – a-ha
Silk and Steel – Five Star

I also had a share in a couple of seven inch singles: the first Band Aid “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and the Frog Chorus.

“The Number of the Beast” was the first time that I went out on my own and bought something entirely of my own choice and without any kind of influence from anyone. I hadn’t even heard any of their music – I just liked the cover – but it opened up a completely different door and set me off in a musical direction that has largely stuck with me ever since.

“Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” was the first Iron Maiden album to be released after this momentous purchase, and I quickly added it to my collection on cassette (CDs weren’t really a thing yet and I’ve never owned a record player). Thanks to the success of the single, “Can I Play with Madness” (and its accompanying promo video featuring Graham Chapman shortly before his death), I was also able to watch the band on Top of the Pops - still a thing in those days, if you can imagine that. I also started putting Iron Maiden posters on my wall, starting with the Seventh Son poster itself, but quickly branching out into Aces High, The Trooper, Somewhere in Time, Piece of Mind, Powerslave… sometimes before I even bought the albums themselves, although they followed soon enough.

I can remember being fourteen, and to be honest I wouldn’t go back there for any amount of money… but at the same time it seems incredible to think that it was twenty-five years ago. I’m so old. Although, not as old as the band themselves, of course, who are playing this album more or less in its entirety on their current “Maiden England” tour.

Twenty-five years. I doubt the fourteen year old me would recognise the 39 year old me if he passed me in the street, but I’d know him from his bad hair, bad skin and terrible glasses (I may have no hair now, but frankly that's an improvement.  I also don't wear glasses now and I've got better skin.  I'm even thinner, for goodness sake....). Poor kid. He doesn’t even realise that his whole life is still in front of him.

If I get the chance, I might even tell him that it’s okay to speak to girls.

It is okay to speak to girls, right?

I was beautiful then....

A helpful random person sent me an email out of the blue yesterday, pointing out that a link on a post of mine from my old site, written in 2004, had a broken link to the US constitution, and suggesting an alternative.  Given that the link he suggested was on an Identity Theft website, and because it's a 8 year old post and not a terribly important link in the context of the post, I haven't bothered to change it (remember when blog posts were full of links to other things?).  What I did do, though, was stop for a moment and read my post.

Have you ever done that thing where you stumble across a dissertation or something that you wrote when you were at University?  It looks so polished and alien that, although you know full well that you did write it, you can't believe that you actually did.

Yeah.  That.

Check me out:

"In the British Constitution, instead of the three branches of government being separate (legislature, executive and the judiciary), in Britain they are concentrated in Parliament. Parliament is sovereign and cannot be limited (in the way that, say, the US Congress can be limited by the Supreme Court). That's not the biggest difference though. Unlike the American Constitution, the British Constitution has never been written down. You cannot take it out of a library and have a look at it. In fact, you pretty much have to be a constitutional expert to have any real idea of what it is. This makes it an inherently flexible system, although its critics would say that never writing it down means that the citizens have no real idea what their rights are or when they are being violated".

Amazing right? It gets better:

"The roots of our parliamentary democracy can be traced all the way back into the middle ages and beyond. It has traditionally been believed that the primacy of parliament began when a succession of kings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were deposed "by the authority of Parliament" ( a phrase actually used in the confirmation of the claim of Henry IV to the throne).... This view of the "Lancastrian constitutional experiment" is dented somewhat by the fact that Edward IV seized the throne from Henry VI in the traditional way - by battle - and Parliament had nothing to do with it. There is however a substantial body of evidence to suggest that people in the middle ages had a real sense of their historical past and a notion of constitution. This awareness only increased with the advent of the printing press, and is reflected in the popularity of the theories of kingship and law found in "mirrors of princes" manuals (like 'De Regime Principum' by Giles of Rome that had been translated into 10 languages by the end of the fourteenth century). This popularity shows that, amongst the political nation represented at parliament at least (we're not talking about the Monty Python peasant here), there was a notion of a consitution dealing with law, justice and property. Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI - the 3 deposed kings - aroused the anger of the political nation by breaching this notion of constitution to such an extent that parliament acquiesced to their deposition. It is this notion of constitution that still underpins the authority of the British Parliament today. It is the bedrock of the constitution".

Nowadays it's all whining about my job, exercise and half-arsed attempts at fiction.  When did I stop writing boring, barely-relavant stuff about medieval concepts of kingship?

They really don't make blogs like they used to.  Even when they're written by the same bloggers.  Twelve comments too.  What happened to comments?

bigmouth strikes again....

As we were driving to work this morning, an innocent conversation about the mist rolling off the river and the number of trees now entirely without leaves suddenly mutated into an argument:

Winter's nearly upon us, I remarked.
Well, said C, actually winter doesn't start until 21st December.
Really? Isn't that the shortest day? Wouldn't you associate that with the depths of winter?
No. It's the winter solstice and it's the official start of winter.

We carried on the debate after we reached the office, with C. sending me something from wikipedia, and me retaliating by sending something back from the met office. As these things tend to do - at least with me - what I thought of as being a trivial, light-hearted discussion seemed to quickly be descending into a surprisingly bitter argument. I'll never learn: just as my dad remains convinced that I used to do a deliberately bad job of mowing the lawn just to piss him off, C seems equally convinced that when we have a discussion like this, I am driven to not only to prove her wrong, but to make her look foolish. Perhaps that's the way it seems, but all I'm trying to do is to understand the basis of the argument. I hope I'm not too grudging when I am proved wrong, but I do like to be swayed by evidence. It's probably my historical training, but even on a subject I know nothing about, I'll never accept anything at face value; I like to be presented with at least some sort of evidence.

I'm the first to admit that this isn't always an attractive trait, and I know that it can have its dark side: I used to maintain that no one is ever more than 80% sure they're right in any particular discussion. With that in mind, I would sometimes chose to make it my position to push at the 20% that wasn't so sure of themselves. All this was originally intended to do was to explore the uncertainty and test the evidence, but in the heat of debate, this probably transformed all too often into a desire to push someone off their point. No matter that the other person may well have been originally more sure of their own argument than I was of my own position, I still found that I could push most people into questioning their own certainty, if not actually making them back down entirely.

I like to think that I've realised that's not actually a very nice way to behave, and it's something to be held back for special occasions. However, in even the most trivial discussion, I have a certain curiosity that compels me to ask questions. It often gets me into trouble at work (in spite of the fact that my analytical brain is the reason I was hired to do this job), and it also gets me into trouble at home.

Why is the shortest day the start of winter?
If it is the start of winter, does that mean that summer doesn't start until 21st June?
If that's the case, why is Midsummer's Day traditionally celebrated on 24th June? Is summer only 6 days long?
When would you say Spring starts? I suppose technically, by this logic, it would be on 21st March - the Spring Equinox. If that's the case, then why is the 1st March called the start of Spring? Is 20th June really still Spring?

....and so on.

These are the questions that I want to know the answers to, and these are the questions that I asked C..... who (perhaps not surprisingly) now thinks that I'm trying to make her look a fool. The thing is, I'm not trying to make her look a fool, and she may well be right.... it's just that I can't stop my brain asking what I see as the unanswered questions, and I then have a need to know the answers. If this is the start of winter, then why? Based on what? Does everyone agree?

Even as C. sent me the wikipedia link, I started searching for more answers.

It seems that winter is traditionally held to start in the UK on 21st December, and has apparently been so for thousands of years, based upon an observation of the stars and the length of the day. Meteorologists don't seem to have much truck with this, and the Met Office for one has the seasons neatly parcelled up: Winter - 1st December; Spring - 1st March; Summer - 1st June; Autumn - 1st September.

But it's all quibbling, isn't it? Aren't the seasons dictated by things other than by dates? The change of the season cannot be marked on a calendar and does not happen at precisely the same moment every year.... there isn't a clock that dictates when birds migrate and animals hibernate; there isn't a calendar that can tell you when the leaves will fall from the trees or when the daffodils will bud. It changes from year to year and is affected by all kinds of things, both natural and manmade...................

And so it goes. More or less every single thing that anyone ever says to me is run through this kind of an internal process, with a succession of questions popping up that can never be fully answered; even if they could be, there are more questions following them up close behind.

I'm not sure why I'm driven to ask these questions, and perhaps more pertinently, I don't know why I haven't yet learned when to stop asking them. I should probably at least be more aware, as I ask all these questions one-by-one, that increasingly the best I can hope for is that I don't lose all my friends by making them feel like they're in front of some kind of ranting inquisition 24/7.

I just can't turn off my brain. Like the scorpion in the fable, I may drown us all simply because it's my nature.

I may be dumb but I'm not a dweeb....

At last! A geek / nerd / dweeb /dork venn diagram.

This is something that has been puzzling me for some time. Over the years, people have used each of these phrases, apparently interchangeably, to describe me. Although I vaguely have an idea what they mean, I've been bothered because I haven't know exactly what they mean. They might mean similar things, but I've always been pretty sure that they don't mean the same thing. I've been called all of them, but what if not all of them applied? Perhaps none of them did? If they didn't mean exactly the same thing, then isn't there likely to be a hierarchy, where one of those words might be considered to be less - or more - insulting than another? Was I taking offence needlessly, or was I not offended enough by what people were calling me?

So: here's a chart that should provide me with some of answers I've been looking for.



From here (via @annapickard)

Hmm. Unfortunately I'm still no clearer.

Well, I say I'm no clearer, what I actually mean by that is "Dangnabbit, I think I probably qualify for all of the above and that most likely makes me a nerd".

The chart must be inaccurate, right?

and I'm living for history....

Unnoticed by everyone - including me - this blog turned 5 last week. That first, tentative entry was made on Tuesday 2nd March 2004, and far from being a stunning introduction of my explosive manifesto to the online world, it didn't even have a title. It's not a very interesting post, and I wasn't going to to write posts on an anything like regular basis for another few months yet.... but it was a momentous monent for me in the sense that it was the start of something that has subsequently seen me produce something like 1,417 posts in 1,825 days and signalled the disappearance of the first of God-knows how many hours into the blogosphere. A journey of several hundred thousand words begins with that first post.

I do claim in that first entry that blogging was something that I'd "sort of been thinking about...for ages", but I certainly can't remember now whatever it was that drove me to start or why I chose to use Blogger instead of WordPress or LiveJournal or any of the many other available alternatives. It all too clearly wasn't inspiration. In all honesty, I probably wasn't thinking much at all as I selected a username in haste that I have been stuck with ever since, chose a template that I subsequently haven't bothered to change, and began to write those trivial twitterings about doing the ironing and other nothings.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

And I wonder where my life has gone.

SwissToni: mildly embarrassed purveyor of mundanity online since March 2004.

---

Other things that happened on this momentous day in history:

> John Kerry wins the Super Tuesday primaries in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island and caucus in Minnesota, effectively clinching the nomination.

> The Palestinian Authority's prisoners' affairs ministry states in its monthly statistical report that the number of Palestinian prisoners has risen to around 7,500. Of those 336 are children, 75 female and 943 in need of medical treatment. Of the 166 prisoners who died, 41% died as a result of medical negligence, while 18% died as a result of torture

> NASA announces that Mars rover Opportunity landed in an area where "liquid water once drenched the surface".

> Oregon prepares to begin solemnizing same-sex marriages, after its attorney issues a legal opinion deeming such marriages lawful.

> Bernard Ebbers, ex-CEO of Worldcom, is indicted on three counts of conspiracy for his alleged role in that company's $11 billion accounting scandal in 2002.

> Iraq gets a Bill of Rights, including guarantees of freedom of religion and press, in the form of the Law of Administering the Iraqi State for the Transitional Period

> The European Union imposes additional 5% tariffs on a wide range of goods imported from the United States, such as honey, paper, and nuclear reactors.

> The European Space Agency's Rosetta space probe is successfully launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket on a mission to investigate the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

... oh, so maybe I was the big news story of the day then?

come with me friday, don't say maybe....

Not two months after writing that last little cry from the heart, life changed a little bit for the 19 year-old me. Well, it didn't really change much at all, but it felt like it had: I had a bit of a kiss and a cuddle with a friend's younger sister when she came up to visit for the weekend. It wasn't quite famine to feast, but it was a start. She was only a couple of years younger than us, and she was pretty cool (a whole lot cooler than her brother anyway), but when you're nineteen years old, two years feels like an awfully big age-gap. We got on from the very beginning, mainly by forming an alliance against her brother who (once he had taken her down the pub to meet his mates) seemed determined to play the part of the surrogate father, and frowned at every drink she had and every cigarette that she smoked. We got on like a house on fire. After closing time, we all went back to another friend's place where we all ended up crashed out. As I remember it, the kissing all happened whilst we were zonked out on the same bed as her brother. As you can imagine, nothing much happened, and I'm fairly sure that the thought of doing anything else never even crossed my mind. To be honest, I probably couldn't believe my luck. When I woke up, I remember feeling nothing so much as really elated. I had no expectations of it going anywhere, but what had happened seemed like enough.

A couple of days later, I wrote down how I was feeling.... and here it is, fifteen years later in all its horrible, inarticulate clumsiness.

---
Tuesday 30th November 1993

c.12:00am

"On the day that your mentality tries to catch up with your biology"

Strange weekend, what do you make of it? Who can you tell here? No one. Drop hints like you want to - but that would be no use - especially living with someone like Roger and the perhaps dubious circumstances in which it took place. It raises the question though: am I living a lie? all this 'no experience' thing that dominates all my conversations and reaction against this last week shagging fest. Yes and no. Yes in that I haven't actually done it yet, but, well, let's just say I have finally had a first taste in a drunken fumble.

How do I feel? Well a little unsure of what actually happened and how she feels about it (if she can remember). What do I do when I next see her? Well, I know what I will do: either I will be all brash and confident, or all coy (depends on the situation).

Not exactly perfect, I suppose. In a way, it doesn't really matter. Nice now that it's happened. Just a harmless snog after all, but hey, can't even brag about it or face up to it like everyone else has to do.

On a physical level, full marks, I think. [I'm sorry about this, but this is actually what I've written here, and I'm not editing....] Wow - schwing - but did you take a child and make her old? [*cringe*. Step away from the Morrissey... he's done you enough damage already, I think] Don't think so and don't even say so... not as bad as perhaps it seems. Power trip? big bad student / man of the world [!!]. Well, she knew my history and perhaps that was kind of endearing. (He says).

I really feel like shouting it out, but although it doesn't feel sordid, in a way it does. Dirty old man takes advantage shocker. How the fuck would I tell HIM [meaning my friend and her elder brother] ? No way - anyone else and it would be all "nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Well-done-mate-better-late-than-never-it-means-nothing". But HER? Uh-oh. Different story altogether - perhaps she'll tell him, but perhaps not judging by the whole extra parent vibe and 'hoho mum, she was in a trolley" thang. Too heavy.

On the bright side though, that she really enjoyed it and wants to come back might tell me something. Maybe she knows!

Well, one for the record books anyway. I loosened up sufficiently for it to happen and that bodes well for the future - I mean, I'm getting on really well with Nicky and I didn't think that would ever really happen again after last year. God, what happened then? [answer: nothing much] At least I must have relaxed since then - something university has done for me!

Thought I'd write this all down for future reference - or perhaps for discovery! Unlike the last piece, less likely to show it to Leon though! Free love sex machine shocker!!

---

Behind that garbled outpouring, I can still detect some relief and some genuine optimism for the future.... It might not have been much in the grand scheme of things.... but I felt as though I had finally crossed a little mental rubicon. I'd proved something to myself. Perhaps I wasn't really a complete freak after all. I took a little more time and a lot of luck before I got any further than this, but one step at a time, eh?

Although, goodness me, I was still clearly very much in need of a slap and someone telling me to get over myself.

Her brother actually didn't find out about this little tryst until after we had both finished our finals, some 18 months later. It was a complete surprise to him, but he bluffed that he knew all about it... until he realised it was me that we were talking about and not someone else he knew called Tim.

Anyway.

I'm a whole lot wiser and articulate about these things nowadays. Obviously.

*cough*.

Let's hope there are no more manuscripts out there waiting to be discovered, eh? There's only so much of my teenage self quoting Morrissey that I can ask anyone to bear....

unpacking books from boxes...

Whilst sorting through some boxes of my stuff that were turfed out of the roof in my parents' house move, I found a couple of bits of writing from my late-teenage years. They're both about girls, and they're both a little bit embarrassing, but as a historian and as a shameless blogger, I'm going to put them both up here, one today and one tomorrow. Besides, I've had a couple of super-strength homemade mojitos now, so what the hell? Finding this stuff was a bit like opening a window straight back into my past. I certainly remember feeling like this, but I don't remember writing it all down.

Dear oh dear.

Anyway, here we go. Please forgive my teenage self.

---

Notes on Being Single. 10th October 1993. [which makes me 19 and just starting my second year at University, I think. Bear with me. I was a slow starter.]

Is it just me and Morrissey, or is that when you're single the whole world seems to be a couple who are both laughing at you? It doesn't matter if almost everyone I know is either totally single or in a massively disfunctional relationship, I am still the only really, irreversibly single person that I know. Let me explain. I seem to be incapable of making any kind of sexual manoeuvre aimed at anyone - I deeply believed at school that when the girls arrived in the sixth form and we treated either like crap or like sex-objects or both that it should be different. Call me a fool, but I felt that first what you did was to befriend somebody and then things would lead on from there. The first problem that I encountered was that once a friend, I didn't feel it was worth risking the friendship. It might just be a chronic fear of rejection, but I think I really have something that blocks off such actions. I've even got to the stage where I surprise friends by even passing a compliment about such and such a girl who just walked past - of course I know what is pretty, what is ugly and what is fat etc., but I find it very hard to apply to the vast mass of people who fall into the middle category. I simply become indifferent and non-judgmental (another glitch in an otherwise massively judgmental personality.)

What if someone makes a move on me or if I hear of an interested party? Well, obviously, after the initial flattery I'll become deeply scared and avoid confrontation entirely until that particular feeling has died away. What to do? Even worse, many people say that I'm of serious marriage possibilities. As one friend said, I'll marry the first girl who gives me a blow-job [ha! wrong!] Well thank you, but no. The thought of being perpetually single without a single experience at University is deeply worrying, but so too is the thought of instant puppy-dog devotion and marriage.

Is it this deep contradiction that throws me into depression and bad moods? Certainly at such times, I tend to lash out at people who may most likely be my friends and will feel disgusted when a close friend has pulled / been pulled and feel that the whole thing is temporary and sordid. Even now I'm still a bit revolted by the behaviour of my male friends of 19/20 who are in relationships of more than six months and appear to want them to end for no especially good reason - are they simply bored of the sex and the commitment that surely goes with it? Do they think that they will instantly find someone else who will gratify their urges and want very little in return? What time is right to feel secure? What ask me for advice as (a) I'm on the girl's side and (b) what experience have I got?

At the end of the day am I just wallowing in self-pity? Am I just a sad bastard who should get off my arse and do something about it? Well, easily said, but I'm sure that I'm not asexual and whether I'm a subconscious devotee of celibacy, I can't tell. I've now put down pretty much everything that has been praying on my mind - why can't I communicate normally with most women? Can it be only a result of experience at public school? Surely not. Well, I'm sure I'll be pissed off, rude and grumpy for a few more days at least, so I guess I'll make the most of it before you show me yours and you laugh at mine [oh, God...]! I guess I'd just like to be understood.

----

So, there you go. Me as a 19 year-old in all of its unedited glory. What a strange, serious boy who has listened to far too much Morrissey and has some very strange ideas about girls and relationships..... so not much has really changed in the last 15 years then.

Dear oh dear. If only I could go back in time and give myself a good slap.

More tomorrow.