John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Famous people I have known: 30 December 2004: Further to my encounters with famous people .. I once saw an actor from Crossroads (the original version, not the one that came back for a second while no-one was looking) in a Hi Fi exhibition in London, and I've sat opposite John Prescott and presumably his wife on the tube going to Heathrow, oh and there were those encounters with John Peel, and there was someone wonderfully famous wandering around the Old Town presumably coming back from visiting Ayckbourn who lives here. And in my former band we were interviewed by Terry Christian. I keep thinking of more but maybe we'll leave it at that.; Anyway, I've just been called an arse by Mark Lamarr on his Christmas Day Radio 2 show. I wrote in saying that he's like a Coronation Street character in that when he first came to the limelight he seemed like a tosser, but now he seems like a really nice bloke. I wasn't trying to be horrible, I actually thought it was part of a well planned strategy. Anyway, he said "John from Scarborough, you're an arse and I can't be bothered to read the rest of your message." Not an unfamiliar reaction I must admit :-)
Ad agencies: 30 December 2004: In the summer, as you probably noticed, I went on holiday to the New Forest and during that went to the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the V&A. In the shop they were selling Sex : Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, a CD purporting to contain the highlights of the contents of the jukebox in Sex, Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop on the King's Road, London which was at the centre of the punk 'revolution'.; It's a really great CD containing not punk tunes, but punk's inspiration including some really good fifties and sixties rock and roll and blues based stuff.; One of the best tunes on there for me was Have Love Will Travel by The Sonics. I played three tunes from the CD, including this one, to the band and they took on all three.; Later, Have Love Will Travel turned up as the soundtrack to the Land Rover Discovery tv ad. After that, Aint Got No Home by Clarence 'Frogman' Henry turned up as the soundtrack to a cartoon hedgehog attempting to cross the road safely.; My problem is .. what do ad people do all day? I mean, where was the research? Basically, all that happened in both those cases is someone from the agency went to the same exhibition that I went to, bought the same CD, and when the time came to choose a tune, they chose something they just happened to be listening to. There's no expertise there, no research. So is that the creative industries in a nutshell?; It's the equivalent of the cut and paste merchants in our industry .. the people who find, on the Internet, snippets of code, cut and paste them into their own program and cobble together something that sort of works but without actually understanding how and not being able to fix it when it goes wrong.; Frankly, having worked in a similar industry, I expected more. Perhaps that's what separates the 'creative industry' from proper artists.
TI: 30 December 2004: I didn't realise you could have a ranking of world corruption, but here it is. Finland, the least corrupt nation on earth. Probably because either people are too cold to leave their houses, or officials shiver so much when they ask for money that no-one can understand them. Is that racist? Who knows. Bangladesh and Haiti jointly share the prize for most corrupt nation.; GB is 11th best .. good news. Which of the traditional European countries is most corrupt? I thought Italy, and yes, it's 42nd, but it's beaten by Greece at 49 which turns out to be the most corrupt country I've ever been to. Not that I'm very well travelled.; Where's the US? 17th, shared with Ireland and Belgium, and just to wind them up, Canada beats them, in 12th.
Huygens: 24 December 2004: At 3:08am tomorrow morning, Huygens will hopefully separate from Cassini and start its descent to Titan. It'll return pictures on the 14 January. How incredibly exciting is that?
And no birds sing: 24 December 2004: I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'm reading Silent Spring at the moment, the scariest book I've ever read. It provides case studies of the after effects of mostly American attempts to control agricultural pests using chemicals.; It's out of date, though, so I don't know whether it captures a moment when the chemical companies could sell pesticides without there being any counterbalancing green movement, or whether actually the same stuff is happening now. My gut feeling is that it's better. At the vegan Indian meal I blogged the other day I met someone who is studying ecology at the local university. Maybe in the forties and fifties such a course would be unheard of. I've a feeling Silent Spring was the start of the popular green movement.; Perhaps partly because of that it's incredibly persuasive. Life changing in fact. There's a sense of looming disaster if nothing is done to stop the chemical companies, rather like the sense we had of total environmental pollution when campaigning against GM.; Maybe nowadays we're used to it, but the author Rachel Carson delivers a sense of her disbelief that we can take known pathogens and, far from dealing with them in sealed laboratories, gaily spray them on the land, on our food, into our water, often for minor reasons and with such headbangingly poor results. When you take a step back from what we're used to, it is unbelievable.; What's the alternative? She mentions one (so far). Introducing sterilised males to a population reduces it greatly. I rather prefer that idea.; I'm only a few chapters in, but one of the most persuasive ideas is that of the increasing concentration of some of the most dangerous chemicals as they pass up the food chain. Chemicals that were derived from wartime nerve gas research (a sprayman who dropped something into the pesticide and picked it out with his bare hand was dead in a few hours, despite washing his arm straight away) were/are being sprayed freestyle on the land for the slightest of reasons, yet provided only temporary relief from the target pest.; These chemicals were stored in animal's fat. When DDD was sprayed in 1949 onto a lake to control a gnat in order to please the fishermen (who presumably thought the fish fed on fresh air) it was done entirely scientifically and with due regard to the resulting concentrations throughout the lake. The resulting concentration would be just 1 part DDD to 70million parts water.; By 1954 the treatment had to be repeated, this time at 1 in 50 million. By the following winter, grebes were dying. Despite that, there was another application in 1957 resulting in more dead grebes.; When someone finally analysed the fatty tissues of the grebes they discovered a concentration of DDD of 1,600 parts per million (ppm).; It's fairly common knowledge nowadays that this multiplication occurs. Each layer of the food chain concentrates more and more of this family of chemicals. The plankton had about 5ppm, plant eating fish had 40-300ppm, and carnivores such as the grebes had the most of all, with a particular fish reaching 2,500ppm.; More scarily, about two years later, after many generations of plankton had come and gone (or whatever it is that plankton do), the concentration in the plankton remained the same. Also, shortly after the last application, no DDD was found in the water. It was all in the animals and plants of the lake.; It doesn't matter, therefore, how low the original dosage of these chemicals, they get concentrated in the plants and animals. Each successive dose adds to the previous until the concentration reaches lethal levels. You might 'treat' an area twenty times with a very dilute dose and think you're getting away with it. But the twenty first might be the final lethal dose. Is that what we're doing to the whole biosphere? When Carson wrote the book in 1962 she said the 1,000 nesting grebe pairs had dwindled to 30, and those produced no young.; We are at the top of the food chain. I find some comfort in that. Selfishness is simply how nature works, and we're no different. If the effect was reversed, we wouldn't give a flying fungus about the plankton. But it's us. We will be the first to know when we've overdone it. Maybe we already have, maybe the rise in cancer cases is one symptom. So to save ourselves, we must stop poisoning the environment. That's good news for plankton everywhere.; Carson doesn't make the point explicitly, but it's also an extremely strong and persuasive case that I don't often hear expounded, not just for vegetarianism but for veganism. By being vegan you push yourself down the food chain. You end up with a lower concentration of these chemicals.; It also seems to make sense to eat organic, and to eat low fat. Also, to diet slowly in order not to release these chemicals too suddenly from our own fat layers.; It appears DDT and DDD were banned from use as pesticides in the early seventies. The point isn't DDD. Well, it is, partly. It appears it doesn't go away, or maybe it does but very slowly. So although perhaps the chemicals aren't being added to the environment with the same zeal, the DDD that was added is probably still there.; The point is more our attitude to risk and the environment. As the GM industry showed, business is quite prepared to sell 'solutions' before assessing the risks. Where risk is probable, it can make the sale all the more urgent. The GM industry was desparate to get GM into the environment so that people felt "oh well, it's done now, we can't go back". Thankfully, that was pretty much stopped. The problem is, we don't know what is being done right now by the same motivators, the same system. By the time they come to our attention and begin to take our campaigning energies, new evils are being devised and born, not accidentally in the places we are not watching.; It's also about the farming lobby's whine that we should be grateful that farmers take such good care of our beautiful countryside. I can't accept even 0.1ppm of that argument. The pressure of agribusiness is always there. Even our one time most common bird, the house sparrow, is feeling the effects. How much longer can this go on? What defence is there against this glacial movement towards a silent spring? Constant vigilance is at least a start.; The sedge has wither'd from the lake, and no birds sing.
North by Northwest: 20 December 2004: We watched the end of North by Northwest on the telly yesterday. Our hero gets the girl and the closing shot is of them in some sort of cabin, we don't know if it's a ship's cabin or a train or what. He pulls her up to the bunk bed. They kiss. The film cuts to and ends with a shot of a long train entering a tunnel.; So, is this the origin of all those visual jokes? The Benny Hill stuff with film of chimneys being blown up played backwards and so on. Surely Hitchcock wasn't being tongue in cheek there. Surely the symbolism wasn't accidental either.
National Treasure: 20 December 2004: It doesn't show it on the website but the UK posters for National Treasure seem to summarise everything that's wrong with Hollywood films and American attitudes. The posters carry a line that says something like "In order to solve the code, one man had to break all the rules".; That's exactly why no-one likes America. Firstly, it's an action film (it was nice to see Eddie Izzard on Top Gear (still the funniest and most amazing programme on telly at the moment .. the car versus bobsleigh race was the most excitement I've had since Attenborough's Life of Birds) last night calling himself an action transvestite). Back to the point. Action films are male. Going for an oversimplified single goal at a cost to everything else is male. American society is male (but granted, I can't think of one that isn't).; "One man". Heroism. It's the wild west mentality. I've moaned about heroes before. The point about a hero is he, and it's always a he, goes against what everyone else thinks and does his own thing. OK, I love individuality. I also love not following the flock. But an American hero isn't someone like Eddie Izzard who does his own thing because it's interesting, fun, human, has depth, is funny, and changes the world in a nice way. An American hero is usually someone who kills and maims the 'bad guys' (bad guys never seem to have family too) to reach their goal.; I remember as a kid asking my mum why, when Jerry got flattened or mangled by Tom there was never any blood. She said it wouldn't be so entertaining if it did (but then she also said all the other boys' willies would look circumcised too when they got older (a defence that lasted about half a second back in the classroom), so you can't trust yer mum all the time (hi mum :-) ). American action films are like Tom and Jerry cartoons. In the shootout at the end of LA Confidential which we saw last night, lots of faceless bad guys got shot dead. Were they not just doing their jobs? Could they not have contributed usefully to society once they'd seen the error of their ways? Why were we shielded from the blood and gore, the reality, and only shown the hero's viewpoint?; "break all the rules". I like rules. I like paying my taxes. I like living in a society that rules by fair laws not by violence. Consequently, I think laws are to be followed. For instance, despite driving between 30-40,000 miles a year for ten years, I've never had any points on my driving licence. The other consequence of that is that I've come to believe that, since companies use the law 'against' me, I need to use the law back. I'm currently trialling that by attempting to get the people who sold me a car with faulty paintwork to pay for a respray. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, rule breaking doesn't turn me on. It's anti society, which means it's anti everyone, it's anti me, it's selfish. Why should I watch a film that's anti me? I wonder how American action films go down in Japan, subject to some conclusive American action not so long ago, and a society that I understand, partly because of its population density, values social rules highly.; I don't think it's a small thing either. America itself acts like that. It doesn't care about anyone else, including the United Nations. Do you remember just a few months ago when Kofi Annan said the Iraq war was illegal and I wrote implying that the Americans would brief against him? Well, it didn't take long. Then there's all the international treaties America has torn up. Hollywood buoys up public opinion for this kind of antisocial behaviour. Maybe we should take out an ASBO on America, that would be fun.; On the taxes thing, I know someone who is planning to live in three countries in order to avoid paying taxes in any one of them. I'm against. He'll drive on the roads and use the hospitals, and I get to pay for that. Not happy.
Party: 20 December 2004: We had a Christmas party on Saturday which really couldn't have gone better. A couple of people deserve a special mention for thoughtfulness. Huge thanks to Lucy for making three furry catnip mice for our cats to play with. I was really touched too by Jo who made us her speciality moussaka because she didn't think we'd be bothered to cook the day after.; I love it when people contribute what they're good at, what they enjoy doing. At one point I wanted to extend that to companies, so for instance if a company decided to help a local charity I liked the idea that employees might come up with ways of contributing by doing what they do best. I might join forces with other musicians to play a song, for instance, while others might cook, paint, organise, build stalls, or whatever they do well. Sadly I think that might work better in the US where people are perhaps more willing to throw themselves into that sort of thing. We're a little too cynical in the UK.; My partner and I created a game designed to get people to mingle. We think it worked really well so I've created a page that explains how to create one of your own. Doing that is distastefully self satisfied and glib but I'm an Internet guy and sharing good ideas is what the Internet's for.
International Association of Webmasters and Designers: 16 December 2004: The website for the International Association of Webmasters and Designers looks pretty rough to me. It looks like all the bullshit from a random salesman's mouth just fell onto the page, they liked the way it looked, and they published it.; What, exactly, is 'designed' about that page? Where does your eye go? Everything has the same weight, the same priority, so your eye goes everywhere and nowhere.; Apparently you get "Special Member discounts on high quality computer." On high quality computer what? Computer mousemats? Computer antidotes?; Almost all of the menu links mean absolutely nothing. Why should I click on a link labelled "A better place to be"? There's a big Information Architecture problem here.; I wonder what the popup that FireFox blocked said. I can't be bothered to find out.; If that's the kind of site they think is good, then God save me from winning one of their Golden Web awards.
Scarborough Tandoori: 16 December 2004: Big thanks to Scarborough Tandoori who created a vegan buffet to 26 likeminded people yesterday evening. It was outstandingly scrumptious.; A good thing too, because their service had gone to the dogs recently so we'd stopped going. We'll have to start going again now.; Then again, they did end the evening by giving us all a small piece of milk chocolate. I could get irritated. I could rant. I mean, FFS pay attention at the back! But I won't. The food overcame my natural inclinations.
G4: 14 December 2004: G4 woz robbed by the cheesy geezer. Sorry, we watched Saturday night telly.; I have to say though, Strictly Come Dancing has been great. Again, it's all about scheduling. I remember the original "Come Dancing" and a more tedious and irritating program it's difficult to imagine, at least from a teenager's perspective. Albeit a teenager open to new experiences .. I actually paid to see a ballet around that time, I don't think I'd do that now.; Strictly Come Dancing has been on at a time when I've been flicking through the tv channels, and it's caught my eye. I particularly got caught by the program where they did a body language analysis of the couples.; Anyway, suffice to say that Jill Halfpenny was a joy and an inspiration (and Darren Bennet of course), a real burst of vibrant life. Absolutely fantastic.; The other thing that occurred to me was .. we never saw a famous sports person at our school. I thought that kind of thing was commonplace. Imagine watching the other worldly Denise Lewis walking into your school. Just the way she walked would tell you all you needed to know about athleticism and achievement, about what you could be if you set your goals high enough and worked hard to achieve what you want.
Two knobs: 14 December 2004: Isn't life cruel sometimes? When you want two knobs, you just can't find ones the right size.; I did DIY things on Sunday and I was fitting a door, hence the need for knobs and the opportunity for a bad joke. I spent the day with the complete works of Blondie going around my head and I couldn't work out why.; Finally I did. I'd been compiling a funky collection of Christmas tunes for a forthcoming party (courtesy of Mark Lamarr, and yes, I know it's wrong), and it included The Ramones' "Merry Christmas (I don't want to fight tonight)". That contains three notes which are pretty much the same as three in Denis by Blondie. I didn't realise why I recognised the three notes at first, but my subconscious did.; I also had Abi Titmuss on the brain. That worries me. How did that happen? I had to look her up on Google to find out who she was, something I'd suggest only to the broadminded, which is why I haven't provided a link. To save you the bother, she seems to be a lads mag favourite, a blonde ex nurse who dated that fine fellow John Lesley, and by being open about her virtues she's reached the heights of hosting her own soft porn show on the telly.; How the hell did she get in my head? The nearest I get to reading trash media is when I scan the News of the World while waiting for my chinese takeaway. I don't watch trash tv, I don't read lads mags .. how all pervasive must her marketing be to have reached me and to have been rattling around my head until I actively found out who she is. That's scary.; I also had Romilly Weeks on the brain and had to do the same. I can cope with that.; Maybe this is exactly what AdBusters is talking about, and what people who meditate try to stop. Maybe marketing has, cuckoo like, taken over the nest. It's thrown out serious thought and replaced it with Abi Titmuss.
RER MegaCorp: 11 December 2004: When I was in a band originally, as a teenager, the bass player (Mark Grebby, yell if you're out there) was a big fan of Recommended Records. It took me a while to get into the style, but there's some really good stuff in there. He led me into a lot of musical stuff I may not have heard otherwise .. Beefheart for one, The Birthday Party for another.; I remember him talking about how Chris Cutler drummed after he'd seen him play. I think he described thinking of him as like a big water wheel, with beats crashing down as they fell over the top of the wheel. Unstoppable. Perfectly timed.; That idea stuck. It's amazing how many links I have in my head to drumming from well before I knew I wanted to do it. I remember wowing over Keith Moon. With Joy Division (I have wee'd in the same toilet as Ian Curtis .. at different times, obviously) and New Order, it was always the beat that drew me in.; Anyway, back to Recommended Records. I remember standing in their shop/office/warehouse one hot summer having walked several sweaty miles from the nearest tube station. I've a feeling they're still in the same premises.; I've tried to order records from them before but I think they have a really tight cost thing going on. They used to sell from a catalogue, so I requested one of those and I'm sure I got no reply. I wrote again and they said they needed whatever it was, 28p or something, to cover the cost of the catalogue. I kinda gave up after that.; Anyway, now they have a spangly new website and it's easy to order, but it's not terrifically easy to work out what's good and what's not. Nevertheless I just placed my first order, for Chris Cutler's solo album.
drum tutors: 11 December 2004: There are two drum tutors in Scarborough that I know of. Actually, if the guy in East Ayton still does indian drumming, there are three but I haven't tracked him down yet. I'd love to learn the tabla. I should really have done that while I was a student in Leeds, but anyway.; My first lesson was from Bob Scott (07838 309691) who has a fairly groovy oral drum solo as his answerphone message. I wasn't sure I'd learned anything at the end, but in the couple of days thereafter I found my playing and enjoyment had come on enormously. That must have been because he corrected my grip and we played with the ergonomics of the kit. He also gave me several sheets of exercises which I kinda breezed through but they did introduce me to the toms on my kit which I tend to ignore. Then there was the whole idea of being relaxed while playing which he reinforced.; This morning's lesson was from Geoff Tonkin (01377 267495). His thing is technical correctness. He spent four years with Drumtech which I'd never heard of but which seems pretty exciting, I mean, wow, you can do a three year honours degree in drumming. I wanna! (But I can't, I guess :-( ); There was something of a transformer about him (no, I don't understand them either). At one point he was sat with his practice pad between his legs and he wanted to pick up his drumsticks to show me something. His sticks were placed one each side of him and were facing in different directions and all wrong. He picked both up, one with each hand, and in one smooth movement, twizzled both sticks simultaneously but differently so that by the time his hands had moved back to the drum, his sticks were ready to play. Quite scary.; We spent the hour gripping the drumstick correctly and letting it fall to the drum and bounce back without fighting it. Zen drumming. OK we did some other stuff like posture, and we moved the kit around again .. I need to do more work on that still (the heights are all wrong), and we did the basic drum strike.; Despite the slowness of Geoff's approach, I think that's what I want. Psychologically I enjoy starting anew. More importantly I think the foundations need to be right before moving to other stuff. With him I think I stand a chance of getting the foundations right. There was something in that exercise of just letting the stick fall and bounce, I felt my hand fighting the bounce rather than flowing with it. It feels important to get my hands and wrists to know how the stick bounces, otherwise I'll always be fighting it.; As an aside I remembered the other day how much I used to admire Chris Cutler's drumming. I must buy some of his stuff or see him play.
RSS: 10 December 2004: Shockingly, I seem to have created an RSS feed for this blog. The file is at http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk/blog.rss if anyone would like to test it and comment.
Ian Paisley: 10 December 2004: It takes a complete nutcase like Ian Paisley to make the Provisional IRA look reasonable (oh come on, he is indisputably out of his tree), but that's where we are today. The fact that he still appears to be popular is a worry.; I just don't 'get' religious people. The good bits of religion don't seem to carry through. Sometimes I think "ok, maybe religion isn't so bad", and I take one look and I'm repelled. When the GM thing was a big public issue, the Church of England was allowing the GM trials to be carried out on their land. I thought they'd be into leaving God's creatures well alone (but then I found that Judaism considers the world's plants and animals to have been placed there for us to mess around with .. I'd started to like that religion until I discovered that).; If there's anything that spills out of religion into the heads of those barely listening, it's the idea of forgiveness. I've come to think of that as a truly great principle. I think it works well in everyday relationships where you can learn to love someone for their faults as much as for their good parts because everything comes from a core value system. You love the positive results of that value system, so you should accept, forgive, and love the downside too because they go together. That turns into acceptance. Acceptance of the whole of someone is just breathtaking.; So where's forgiveness in the ultra-religious PaisleyWorld? He said recently the IRA should be wearing sackcloth and ashes. Paisley is clearly blocking peace right now. Where the IRA has moved enormously in the last few decades, Paisley doesn't seem to have moved at all. I suppose he would say that's because he has unshakeable belief, I guess he'd proudly wear his stone-like properties as a badge.; The IRA was a reaction to the appalling treatment of the Irish by the British, something I'm totally ashamed of. I visit Ireland every now and then, and I am always stunned by how friendly and welcoming the Irish are .. I don't think we deserve that, I often come away thinking "why haven't we been beaten up?" And now, the British side seems to be represented by Paisley who seems to want victory. It is us who should be wearing sackcloth and ashes, begging forgiveness from the IRA. The Irish are bigger than that, they are in the process of forgiving.
Corbis moan: 9 December 2004: Wow. I'm trying to use the photo library Corbis and it just keeps failing in the worst way. Corbis is owned by Microsoft, so you'd expect their software to work, right?; People-wise, Corbis seems to work. I emailed in a query, someone called me back and they're helping me to find suitable images. They are doing that by adding them to my lightbox (photographers put slides on a lightbox so they can see them and choose between them). In Firefox/Linux all I see is an empty lightbox. It works in IE6/XP though. Do we think that could be deliberate, maybe in the hope that people would see Linux as being flaky rather than Corbis?; There are various opportunities to write a comment on the lightbox, so I thought I'd write one to the person choosing images for me. I crafted a nice descriptive note, saved it, and it didn't save it. That's worse than not having the facility. Don't waste my time. If the function isn't there, fine. But if it looks like it's there and then fails, that's disrespecting and wasting my time.; There's a thing to click to provide comments on their lightbox facility, so I thought I'd give that a go. It opened a popup which looked like I just needed to click a few questions and there was a space for my comments. So I typed merrily away on that for a while, then looked around for the submit button. There wasn't one. I had to expand the window to see it, along with some other questions. I'll bet they lose 80% of their respondees right there.; I clicked submit. A popup error message told me I should limit my comments to 1,000 characters. Why's that then? When I'm telling them specific things about the many errors so they can be fixed, why is there a limit. That's like telling me to shut up. "Stop right there Mr Allsopp, you're out of time, good day". So, I'm doing them a favour, after how I've been treated, by letting them know the problems I found, and that's their approach? Boy oh boy.; Forget it, I'll go somewhere else (I tried, but the rep talked me round).
Bridget Jones Males: 8 December 2004: There was an article in the paper featuring men who were single but didn't want to be, and in that one of the men, who looked like Mr Potato Head himself, said the problem was he "hadn't found the perfect woman yet".; Mate, there are no perfect people. There are just faulty people doing, if they're good, the best they can.
Hate something, change something: 6 December 2004: It's a bit late now to be saying how wonderful the Hate Something, Change Something Honda tv ad is, but it's fackin' wonderful, we love it. It expresses completely the punk / Tom Peters value set .. don't complain, do something.; It's persuasive too. We will have to replace our car in the next year or so. We noticed there's a Honda dealership in Scarborough. I don't know whether there's always been one or whether it's just as a result of the ad, we've noticed it. Also, since our disastrous relationship with Peter Stockill we decided it's really only acceptable to buy a car from a manufacturer with a local dealer, preferably one we can walk to. Presently we are minded to buy a Honda.; I also remember probably ten years ago or so the government worrying themselves that engineering courses at universities were undersubscribed. They were working out how to make engineering sexy. Actually, engineering is very sexy at the moment. The whole idea of doing something physical instead of dealing in ideas and software makes someone somehow more real, more grounded, more meaningful. Every time we drive up Ilkeston Road to, err, Ilkeston we always cheer as we drive past the wall my dad built. It must have been fifty years ago that he did it, but as kids he used to mention it every now and then when we drove past on the way to visit our grandma and grandad. I doubt anyone connected with me will be visiting my websites in fifty years time and cheering. No 'fackin charnce.
fackin': 6 December 2004: We've just spent the most enjoyable weekend in the company of some friends (hi Mike and Wendy) and their parents. One set of parents are just so funny, we love them to death. Many of his tales are peppered with the f word but with an east end (of London) twang, so we spent the journey back practicing our "fackin 'ellw"s.; He has a thing about people of restricted growth (dwarves or midgets to you and me). I had to confess to him that the sexiest woman on television at the moment, to my mind, is the love interest in Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere, Tina (played by Lisa Hammond also here, here, and in North Face here).; The fact that I'm 6'6" tall adds a certain poignancy, don't you think?; For the record, we stayed in an extremely nice, modern self catering apartment in the very beautiful village of Swayfield. Much recommended. Alison and Nigel, 01476 550097, 13 Corby Road if you fancy it. Swayfield is just off the A1, south of Grantham, North of Peterborough. It's within a shout of Rutland water.