Both Barrels

The Tenth of July Two Thousand and Thirteen. Wednesday.

Twelve years ago last week I did that marriage thing. It was ace - didn't quite work out, though, but you know c'est la vie and all that. I believe that it was technically the Linen Anniversary and if I have one regret about the break up of my marriage it's that nobody bought me any sheets or curtains last Sunday. Or towels. Even if I wasn't partial to a bit of Douglas Adams that would have been nice.

Anyhoo, that was the day I took my wife's surname and became a Marsden Hendrick. Now, the prototype version of that name was formulated in the dying days of the Twentieth Century when we went and had one of those children things. Several decisions were made there and then. Firstly, Marsden Hendrick sounds better than Hendrick Marsden so we went for that. And we wanted a bit of room for manoeuvre on which bits of it to use so we forewent a hyphen. And lo, it came to pass, that the first Marsden Hendrick was initialised and he would go on to have the designation MH1.

(And yet, with a bit of Googling I discovered that there were Marsden Hendricks even a century before that. On the 25th November 1891 Gertrude Marsden married Elias Hendrick in Providence, Rhode Island. I don't know if they ever formally used the name Marsden Hendrick but they lived, raised a family and were buried together when they passed on. Here's their grave in Pocasset Cemetary in Cranston, RI.

Their son, Clifford signed up for the army at the age of 19 just as World War I was coming to a close. Here's his draft card and it's interesting to note he used Marsden as his middle name.

So there is a bit of history to the name - it's just that it's someone else's history.)

So there was (more than one) precedent for the Marsden Hendrick name when I came to marry. I always thought it was odd the way only the woman took the man's name and while I suppose there must be a better way of doing it, me adding my wife's surname (and following my son's name) seemed a working solution. Besides, I was inspired by one of my musical heroes. No, not John Ono Lennon. Paul Waaktaar-Savoy of a-ha, of course.

I'm not trying to be wacky or ironic there - he genuinely is. Here's 2 and a half minutes of his songwriting quality for you.

Now I realise that the logical conclusion of this would be that if any of my children married someone called, for example, Lucy Smith Jones, then my grandchildren would be Marsden Hendrick Smith Jonses. And their Children could be Kirkwood Nguyen Okeke Skenonton Marsden Hendrick Smith Jones, etc. But we'll let them worry about that, shall we?

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, that's how I became a Marsden Hendrick, something I'm very proud of (my designation is MH3). There's even a family motto: "unum patitur, omnes pati" (bob that into Google translate if your Latin's not up to scratch). And despite most computers either demanding a hyphen (my payslip does this) or squashing the whole thing up into one long Marsdenhendrick (plane tickets, etc) my passport resolutely declares both of my barrels separated by a space.

More soonliest.

Naked Exams

The Twenty-Eighth of June Two Thousand and Thirteen. Friday.

I have finally applied for the Level 2 British Sign Language Course, something I have been meaning to do for months. And I am terrified. Oh, the brain pod knows I can do it. But the second - the very second - I clicked the 'confirm' button I could feel my heart rate increase and the muscles in my neck knot themselves up. I still have nightmares where I am due for an exam that I have not revised for even twenty years after the last time I was invigilated. I've never imagined that I was naked in any of them, but I put that in the title because, lets face it, nudity sells. Flabby, forty-four year old nudity.

It's anticipation of that anxiety (yes, you read that right. I worry about becoming anxious - all very meta, I'm sure, but not very helpful) that has stopped me from applying before. Bless 'em, the BSL courses website doesn't make it obvious how to go about continuing your studies (I somehow stumbled through level 1) and I experienced the very same feeling that caused me to stop at the first hurdle last time I thought about applying. But this time I persevered. My reward was a course that has gone up in price since when I should have got on with it, so well done me - my feebleness defined in monetary terms.

So as you can see, I am not a newcomer to the world of stress. But it's not a situation without hope. Whenever I feel overwhelmed I turn to the experts, namely fitness spokesperson, author and model Dr Knox.

He is definitely a doctor - that is definitely a stethoscope.

It was his recommendation the led me to waleshypnosis.com (there is also harleystreetclinic.net but I'll have no truck with that Harley Street crowd after my last face lift went south. Mind you the Virtual Gastric Band sounds tempting...) Apparently this guy was taught by the guy who taught Paul McKenna. A man of many talents a quick shufti through the menu reveals that once you have shed the necessary pounds (of weight/cash/delete as applicable) you can go on and revisit your past lives. Dr Martin is 'open-minded' about this controversial subject. Open minded to the tune of £47 a session).

Of course when I heard Dr Knox talk about 'Whale's Hypnosis' I was very excited. The thought of our cetacean cousins practicing mesmerism excited me greatly. I soon realised my mistake, but my research quickly led me to an altogether more deadly marine hypnotist - the cuttlefish.

All of which turned out to be counter-productive. After watching that I was even more anxious than ever! D'oh!

More soonliest.

How To Spell Desiccated

The Thirteenth of June Two Thousand and Thirteen. Thursday. 

I haven't even got one sentence into this thing and I am already desperate for a milk chocolate Bounty and a cup of tea. Bear with me while I put the kettle on. 

That's much better. I'm not actually a fan of dark chocolate, but I do have a soft spot for red Bounties. Nevertheless, that was a blue Bounty and it was still delicious. Me and coconut have always had an understanding. I can still remember Simon Groom getting told off in a viewer's letter that the list of ingredients for his Blue Peter recipe had misspelled the "desiccated" (and I'll confess, I relied on autocorrect there) in desiccated coconut, yet I can't remember what the actual recipe was for. I also remember the amusement on a school trip to the south of France from pronouncing noix de coco ice cream as "knocks di coco". And on one of them there dating sites that, yes, I've put myself out there upon I've mentioned coconut rings among my favourite biscuits. I also smashed one to bits with a hammer on my back doorstep when I couldn't break into it with a drill. I'd say I had a soft spot for coconuts, but clearly 'soft' isn't the word. 

All of which is preamble for me confessing to the fact I've fallen for the hype and gone and bought an iPad. Well, am still buying (will be for the next nine months...) You know, it probably wasn't the most   necessary item on my list of things to get (paging Doctor Washing Machine), but I tell you - comics look blinking amazing on it in HD. So there's that. 

I thought I'd do a test run at blogging on the pesky thing. Hmm, the app doesn't have any handy linky things. Let me try and insert a photo. 

Those are actual rings made out of coconut, accompanied with a spooky disembodied hand. Of course, what I was referring to was this delicious alternative. 

So photos don't seem to be a problem. So when I'm out and about I might just use this although it occurs to me that it would probably be just as easy to use the web page on Safari since the screen's big enough. Blimey, this has been a bit of a dead end, for you and for me, hasn't it? If I am going to get back on the blogging horse I'd better be a bit more lively than this. I wonder if I can save this before I go with something spectacular?

Great - last minute save. Apparently Coconut Crabs are the largest arthropod. 

Come to think of it, I seem to remember reading about them in my 'Man's Conquest' magazine. 

Although I was disappointed that the cheesecake model was just an attractive young woman and not an actual cheesecake - ho-hum.

Here's one on the crabs having a bit of a scuttle. 

http://youtu.be/4DZ0VEjJZs4

More soonliest. 

Sunday Night at the Palladium Tetrafluoride Factory

The Fourteenth of April Two Thousand and Thirteen. Sunday.

Palladium Tetrafluoride (PdF4) is is a strong oxidising agent and undergoes rapid hydrolysis in moist air and is only mentioned here in order to shoehorn in a very weak pun. Although, it was interesting to note that palladium - the metal - has its own currency code (under the ISO 4217 standard that labels pounds as GBP, euros as EUR and American dollars as USD one troy ounce of palladium is represented by XPD) and that one of the chemists associated with its discovery - Richard Chenevix - was awarded the Copley Medal. I mention this because at this moment I'm listening to Gary Copley on Radio York (big bands, vocals and jazz. Not normally my thing, but doing it quite nicely at the mo). Here's Gary rocking a tank top:

Ha-ha, they've reversed that photo! His buttons do up on the wrong side, like he's wearing a blouse! Still, that tank top is fierce. Man, I wish our tank tops at work were like that. Instead they look like this:

Brrr! (Incidentally, have you ever wondered why they're called 'tank tops'? I did until I Wikied it two minutes ago. Here's why. Remember: knowledge is a bell you can't unring.

Anyway, that's not the same Gary Copley as the Dublin artist who paints pieces like this:

All of which is my way of saying that things have been pretty much the same all the time I've not been blogging. Everything bumps into everything else. The sails of the Blut Vin Windmill rotate back to their origin as they must.

I've just bought the 3rd season of my Nineteenth Telly Recommendation, Community, which they didn't have on Region 2 so I have gone and forked out for a Region 1 disc. Before watching Manchester City reach the FA Cup final I spent my Sunday watching three episodes of it including the sublime Remedial Chaos Theory which follows the characters through seven different timelines. Clever and funny.

I also watched three episodes of my Twentieth Telly Recommendation, The Mimic. It's being repeated on More 4 from next Sunday (as well as the whole series being on 4od) and I think it's worth a watch. The trailers all show Terry Mynott as the main character, Martin, doing his impressions and I thought "oh, this is all a bit obvious". But then a clip featured this exchange as Martin discusses the merits of a DVD with his friend, Jean:

‘Nah it’s got subtitles. I hate that.’
‘Subtleties Jean; it’s got subtleties.’
‘I don’t like those either.’.

That made me smile and I thought I'd try it after all. I was rewarded with a sweet and melancholy short series (it's only five episodes - give it a go) that mixes a deliberately aimless charm with some very good character work and performances.

That'll do for now. Excuse me while I get some toast before bed.

More soonliest.

What the Head Said

The Twentieth of February Two Thousand and Thirteen. Wednesday.

I can't remember when I first heard the voice. It sounded like Adele on a loop - you know, that enticing but slightly irritating pub singer enunciation - echoing inside my head. I was sure it was someone speaking or singing but any words were indistinct. At first I thought it was some sort of fluid in me eardrum deal. But there comes a moment when any person is confronted with the impossible that they have to put aside their protestations and just accept that something is real.

Yeah, try and explain that with your precious science, Professor Brian Cox.

It was then that I conducted a series of triangulation tests in order to determine the exact location of the voice's source. By standing with a bucket on my head in Heaton Park and on top of the Trafford Centre I was able to calculate from where these mysterious words were emanating.

Imagine my surprise to discover it was from an active volcano halfway between Manchester and Liverpool!

Mount St Helens, which last erupted in 1980, is situated just off the M62 (Junc. 7). Bizarrely, during that eruption an enormous statue of a head emerged from the Earth's crust. My in-depth research revealed that it was this mystery head that was responsible for the voices that were haunting me. So on Monday I went to visit it to see what it was on about.

I gingerly tip-toed my way through the ash and pumice and obsidian and whatever else it is that comes from volcanos (volcanoes? vol-canoes? What? Canoes?) And there I confronted this monstrous boat race and raised my fist, challenging it to speak again.

Only now it remained silent. "What would you have me do, o head?" I implored once more.

Again, silence.

I remained there for about another hour and a half (that's how long the podcast about narrow boats I was listening to lasted). And still, all I got was this:

Well, that was enough for me. I don't like being jerked around, even if it is by a giant head on top of a volcano. I poured the last of my luke warm tea out of my tartan thermos and set about heading home.

And that is when the monolith spoke. I don't know how many people heard its words - to me it seemed as if the sounds were still coming from inside my head. Maybe its message was for me and me alone. At any rate I feel a desperate need to share those words with you now.

As I stood there, teetering at the crater's edge, the head finally passed what it had been trying to say to me all this time:

"Near a tree, by a river, there's a hole in the ground where an old man of Aran goes around and around..."

More soonliest.