My big announcement for this week is that I’ve been for four runs! My sprain is definitely healed, but I have the stabby tight calf muscle that I had earlier in the year, still. It doesn’t get any worse with running, so off we go. I have gone back to the beginning of C25K for the third time, and I’m doing W2D2 next. May have to take Bernard with me, though.
How have you coped with running in the heatwave?
Are you living in the same place as in 2004/05?This morning, twitter tells me two things:
Now, had I been The Government and wanted to bury some news, this would be the day I did it. I’m certain the internet porn ban is not something they want to bury, as this is pure Daily Mail headline policy making: unevidenced and unworkable nonsense.
I’ve read more than one blogpost raising questions that surely should have been asked before this policy was made public, and have a few questions of my own for a friend.
Apparently households that are already online (there must be quite a few of those, no?) can opt out of the ban. If you opt out, does your name get written down in a special book? Do we have to explicitly state that we want access to porn? Which member of the household decides this? The mum? The teenage son? Heaven forfend, there may be some households where one member is unaware that another member is looking at porn. Or reading porn, because not all porn consists of visual images. And does it only apply to households with children, because it’s not clear whether this is to prevent the “corrosion” of childhood, or to mend broken adults.
How do you define porn? The articles I’ve read only refer to child porn (which is already illegal) and online pornography depicting rape. How do you define rape? Where do we stand with fictional accounts of domestic violence? Is all SM porn now illegal?
Why limit it to online porn? Or are parents expected/allowed to control access to other depictions of violence against women (e.g. certain videogames) or sexualisation of children (certain Nabokov books)?
Why limit it to porn? My son appears to believe that when you die, you just go back to your spawnpoint, and if you get drop-kicked in the face, you lose a few health points but can make them back up by taking a magic potion. Or something. He also likes to wear a baseball cap backwards, and prefers Haribo to vegetables. All of these things are, in the long run, bad for society, and therefore should be legislated against.
How can it possibly still be okay to show the bare breasts of teenaged girls on Page 3 of The Sun? The government seems deeply uninterested in this matter. Perhaps they assume children cannot be corroded by this because they won’t be able to prise the family’s copy of The Sun out of their slathering uncle’s grubby hands.
Isn’t it fantastic that Facebook already bans any image of female nipples? Oh, apparently they don’t. Only breastfeeding images. And they do allow jokes about rape. And I just googled “facebook breastfeeding rape,” and am now waiting for the knock at the door…
If we ban all depictions of non-consensual sexual acts, will we no longer have to teach our children about consent? Because then, as Orwell said, a heretical thought will literally be unthinkable.
It’s 1976 and some of us aren’t even born yet. Dr Pockless and I are eating 6p portions of chips on the promenade at Filey, with our feet cooling in the boating pond and no idea where our parents are. I am five years old and still cute. Elton John and Kiki Dee are just about to top the charts with Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and the Montreal Olympics have just started, but we kids are unaware of that. All we know about is sand between our toes and losing all our pocket money in the slot machines.
As Graybo mentions, there is a water shortage, so like in medieval times, let’s drink beer instead, and never mind the garden. There can’t be such a thing as a hosepipe ban because they weren’t invented until 1991, and if all else fails we can pour the czech lager on the lawn. In some cases this is likely to happen anyway.
We have filled a large paddling pool for anyone who wants to cool their feet, and added some grass clippings, mainly for Gordon but also for everyone who has ever been a kid in a paddling pool. And mainly a couple of dead bees as well, to make it spicy, and one on the outside for Lisa to step on. Enjoy your consolation drink, Sir; you could probably use it as suncream. Lisa is our first Pimms claimant of the day; luckily we have another paddling pool right here, free of grass clippings, and full of Pimms and lemonade. And then there’s a third paddling pool full of champagne, especially for Lyle, big enough for Lori‘s boat trip.
Several of the young ‘uns claim not to have been born in 1976 (others don’t admit to it at all, not wanting to give too much away about their ages). Clair can have a whippersnapper, and Pixeldiva can have some sympathy to pass on to her mum, from one who had a baby in the heatwave of 2006 and knows just how miserable it probably was.
Anna‘s cocktail sounds delicious, and her antisocial teenage summer rings a few bells as well. I skulked in our damp haunted house that didn’t warm up even on the hottest days, listening to obscure music and writing angsty fiction. She challenges you today to come up with suitable music for marriage proposal and rejection; so after you’ve had your drink, please head on over there to do that. Talking of obscurity and music, Vaughan. That is all.
Ms Gammidgy va en France avec beaucoup des enfants et (j’espere) beaucoup beaucoup du vin. Je serai tellement etonnee si non. Bon vacances! [n.b. accents are Lyle’s department].
The prize for the most active summer memories goes to the star of next week’s interview, and your host for next week’s cocktails (which may be served at International Cocktail Time for the pleasure of our friends over the water), Asta. Asta will be choosing her own theme and dishing out her own insults: enjoy.
In fact it is far too hot to be insulting today. I don’t think I have really been rude to anyone yet. Some Fridays I worry that I may have been a tad too rude, so today I should remind you that you are all lovely and it’s so nice to have you here for cocktails every week, and I really can’t be bothered to think up imaginative insults in this weather. Very happy that it’s not 42°C, which sounds deeply uncivilised, not to mention unhealthy. Please take care in the heat, Mark and other americans.
And in the continued absence of Sevitz, it is up to Mike to bring down the tone of the afternoon by conjuring up mildly disturbing thoughts of being on heat in the heat. Somebody please turn the hose on him.
We’re in the middle of a heatwave. It’s the last day of term. These are the kind of summer holidays Bernard will remember. Drinks today will be long and cool, accompanied by rock pools to cool your feet in. Look back over the hazy decades and share your summer holiday memories with us.
Like so many other artists that go on to become long-enduring successes, David Bowie’s first album doesn’t really fit into the rest of the canon. It’s the sound of someone trying to be something that they’re not, rather than finding their own niche and charging into it with gusto.
David Bowie (1967)
That said, with repeated listens things did pick up a bit. I quite liked the first half of “Little Boy Blue” which was uncannily reminiscent of Elbow. And some of the songs are quite catchy, in a not too annoying way. But it’s impossible to pick out any song and call it good, because scattered throughout the album are all sorts of odd moments and strange ideas that make you wonder what the fuck he was thinking. There’s some potent songs in here, but ruined by decisions that are basically dealbreakers.
All in all, a fairly unauspicious start. If this project were a quest to discover hitherto unknown gems, then I haven’t found any here.
Hits from this album: There’s probably no songs here that you will have heard of before.
My favourite song from this album: None. There’s a few that I fairly like, but it’s impossible to choose one, because as I said before, there’s a dealbreaker in every song.
Next up: David Bowie (aka Space Oddity). His naming convention for albums is, so far, a little unhelpful.
Bernard is imminently going to stop being an Infant and start being a Junior. This feels like a huge step, and uniform-buying has commenced. I have even sourced the correct triangular pencils (but only one of them, supplemented by cheap Tesco pencils).
Are you living in the same place as in 2004/05?Yes. We bought a nice Victorian end-terraced house in West Bridgford in January 2003 and we’re still there. I’m in more-or-less exactly the same job too, certainly in the same place (the vagaries of outsourcing and insourcing mean my actual employer has changed a couple of times). My friends tend to tease me about this, but I honestly couldn’t care less. I like our house. My job… well, it’s close to my house. My wife travels a lot for work, but I’m a bit of a homebird really. I stay in and feed the cat. Nottingham is nice enough, but I’m not sure I really see it as home, even after more than fifteen years here. We took time off work (after my diagnosis with MS) and traveled for several months in 2010. It was brilliant and I’d like to do more of it. There’s so much world to see and so little time.
Well, I’m a thinner than I was in 2005, but I think basically the same and probably recognisable (if you knew what I looked like before). I’ve actually got a beard at the moment too, mainly because I saw a picture of myself the other day and I looked so gaunt that I felt I needed to take drastic action to cover my sunken cheeks. I don’t know if the beard suits me, but I feel oddly manlier just for having it. Beard and tan brogues. I am the very model of the modern metrosexual.
Probably wi-fi. If I didn’t have that, then I would have been blogging from pretty much exactly the same spot for the last ten years. The same house is fine… but the same spot would be a little depressing. Mobile Internet is also an amazing thing. I’ll often pause in the act of looking up some obscure fact on my phone to settle an argument in the pub to remember how I used to wrestle with the utter crapness of WAP. I discovered Abkhazia’s struggle for independence from Georgia purely as a result of a Google in the Stratford Haven to settle an argument on the nation that comes first in alphabetical order. This then led to another debate about whether a “de-jure independent state” counted as a nation, or if it was Afghanistan after all.
Yes. I started blogging at the beginning of March 2004 and I’ve been a pretty consistent 5-times-a-week blogger ever since. In 2009 I switched alter-egos from “SwissToni” to “Swisslet” and changed URL, but I seem to be unable to kick the habit. I’ve dabbled with Twitter and Facebook and the like, but I keep getting drawn back to longer-form writing. I think it scratches a creative itch that my job does not. I fear this is a displacement activity from writing “properly”, but I can’t seem to stop. I don’t think it’s even about an audience: I just have this compulsion to write.
Why the change from SwissToni to Swisslet? It was an identity casually adopted and I began to chafe at not having my own online identity. I’ve never considered blogging under my real name, even though I don’t think that’s especially a secret.
My marriage. I met C back in 1997 when I first moved to Nottingham, and we finally married in 2007. I didn’t think I was that bothered about the whole thing, but actually I really do cherish the extra commitment that marriage signaled. I’m not terribly romantic on the whole, but I’m undoubtedly a better person for having her in my life. She’s a patient woman. That said, I’m also quite proud of a half marathon time of 1hr 51mins 59s too. A lot of sweat went into that!
I feel like a fraud. I do spend a lot of time writing and talking about music, but I do wonder sometimes if I genuinely love it, or if I have a sort of train-spotter’s mentality to it and like to pick it apart more than actually listen to it. I know a lot about it and have a lot of it, but am I one of those people who would cease to function without music? I’m really not sure. I’m an analytical person, by the way. Can you tell? Mind you, my first great musical love – after Nik Kershaw – was heavy metal, and I’m not sure any amount of analysis can explain why I ever bought “Open Up and Say….Ahhh!” by Poison.
I woke up with a numb hand in July 2005, but wasn’t actually diagnosed with MS until the late summer of 2009. By the time I actually was diagnosed, I’d long since come to terms with the fact that I probably had MS and that there was little that I, or anyone else, could do about it. I do think I sound excessively stoic when I write about this, perhaps downplaying my condition, but the simple fact of the matter is that shit happens and life goes on. There are lots of people with MS far worse affected than me, that’s for sure. You can either feel sorry for yourself or just keep buggering on. I chose the latter. I’ve been injured a bit this year, and had to face up to the fact that my MS is starting to impact my ability to run and that one day it could stop me running altogether. I actually found that really hard to deal with and realised for the first time quite how much my own internal sense of wellbeing is bound up in my physical exertion. I’m not a natural athlete by any means, so what keeps me going? The thought that if I stop I may never be able to start again. It’s probably as simple as that.
Well, it was here, Gordon! Why? Running club, of course. Blogging is changing though: most of the blogs I have been reading for years seem to only update very rarely, and many have fallen away completely. It’s not like it used to be, is it? I engage with people a lot more frequently on Facebook (which I only joined in 2010 to share photos with the people I met travelling). I feel a bit sad about that. Long form blogging is a distinct medium and I miss that interaction. Probably I’m just not looking hard enough.
1m98cm. Or, in old money, six foot five. That’s not so tall, is it? Really?
Asta.
Thanks for having me. Sorry I’ve never learned brevity in ten years of blogging!