On Demanding

The Ninth of April Two Thousand and Fourteen. Wednesday.

I don't think I'm what you could call an 'early adopter'. In fact, I have a knack of persisting with old tech when clearly better alternatives exist due to some sort of fear-based inertia. Hmm, fear-based inertia, that's probably been the defining characteristic of my life.

Nevertheless, inertia is resistance to movement not an absence of it and eventually I end up getting swept away, not usually by choice. In the past I have meticulously combed the listing magazines (usually the Radiotimes (pronounced 'raddy-ot-imez', of course, as per Victor Lewis-Smith)) and programmed me recorder to catch everything I want to watch for the week well in advance. Oh, the thrill of getting my first VCR. That was also in the late eighties - funny how often that period is cropping up at the mo. I knew the day was inevitably coming. I asked my Then Girlfriend to record Doctor Who on pristine VHS knowing it wouldn't be too long before I actually had a machine to play them on. My Mam and Dad had steadfastly refused to buy one, having no truck with this unnecessary contrivance in much the same way they had resisted the TV remote control longer than was necessary. When a friend (whom I shall refer to as Baron Moorside) offered his old video for £20 I bit his hand off. Even now I'm getting a slight frisson at the memory of being able to rewatch programmes as much as I wanted. Blimey, it used to be only once, didn't it? Hoping something you liked would be repeated - oh, those summer repeats of Doctor Who. What a treat.

This is exactly what it looked like when I went there. Ish.

Anyway, the next thing you knew me Dad had a big pile of Gardener's World tapes - funny how quickly he came round. The skill of programming the timer. I remember my best friend's Gran used to get around that nonsense by setting off an E240 before we all went out to the Pendlebury Miner's Club for snooker, darts and cheap lager so that she had Prisoner: Cell Block H taped without having to worry what time it came on (and the fact that Cell Block H was further along depending which ITV region you were in. During that brief stay in Leicester I was seeing Central episodes, while at home - due to our house being near the park and needing to point the aerial in the other direction - it was HTV, with post Miner's Club episodes being on Granada). And hovering over the Pause and Record buttons to catch when you thought a good trailer was going to be on - I was still doing that in 2005 when Doctor Who came back.

That was all fine for recording, but then there was all the film and telly stuff you bought on VHS - the tab broken to prevent recording over. They were soon enough replaced with DVDs - instant access, commentaries, extras and all. Like most of this history, it was Doctor Who that nudged me to take up the next innovation. When it moved into HD I invested in a laptop with a Blu Ray drive, eventually inheriting my Mam and Dad's old HD telly (by now they were dedicated technophiles, upgrading their equipment as and when) in order to watch on a larger screen.

I eventually went all digital with me recording, as I have chronicled here and here. In other words, I did what everybody else more or less did with their tellies over the past 20 years. Was there some point to this meandering nonsense?

Yes. I wanted to declare that broadcast television is dead.

I've gone and bought a Now TV box - I thought I couldn't go wrong for a tenner. As well as on demand access to the good Sky stuff (Game of Thrones, Girls, This is Jinsy, Mid Morning Matters, etc, etc) it has a slightly less convoluted interface for iPlayer than my PVR as well as access to 4OD and Demand 5. The Wii that I inherited has You Tube and Netflix on it and so I'm now finding that instead of trying to preplan my viewing, I'm now simply waiting until somebody says something good is on and watching it on demand or on catch up. Films I have on DVD I am calling up on Netflix instead, rather than going through the taxing task of opening a box, switching on a machine and putting a disc in it. With BBC3 moving entirely online and iPlayer about to shift to 30 day catch up I think I will be spending the rest of my TV days in a perpetual lag. Which suits me fine. That said, it's too much of a faff trying to watch On Demand stuff from other countries, so I'm still ordering DVDs from the US and Australia which undermines everything I was saying!

That said, I think there must be something in my unconscious that tries to recreate that feeling of 'see something once, then it's gone' from my youth as I always seem to put off watching stuff until the day before it's about to disappear from the menu. There's two things I've managed to miss that I kept putting off and off, so I guess the moral of this story is you just can't help some people.

I'd worried before that my modest Talk Talk broadband connection wouldn't be able to handle all this, despite their claims of unlimited data. So far, it's worked ok - but I know the day of the cloud crash is coming (I've only just got the hang of Dropbox and iCloud). But like the wobbly switch on my bedside lamp I'm going to keep on using it until it finally packs in.

More soonliest

Nothing Ever Happens (And I Guess It Never Will)

The Eighth of April Two Thousand and Fourteen. Tuesday.

That odd little period in my life at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties seems to be bubbling up out of nowhere at the mo. Christmas 88 I'd just come back from a term at Leicester University after realising that I wasn't going to make it as an astrophysicist. Three months where I spent more time at Another World Comics on Silver Street rather than lectures, paid a visit by train to Bedford in the middle of the night (I remember being stopped by the police on my way to the station, checking I wasn't up to anything nefarious. Oh, and the swans having a moonlight paddle on the Great Ouse) and bumped into my vegan housemate shoplifting in a vegetarian shop. It's when my brief career as a civil servant began (as mentioned in the last blog) with stints at the Social Security Appeals Tribunal (in charge of a giant photocopier!) and the DSS (updating inmates NI contributions), thanks to my mate Steph's dad (sadly no longer with us) putting in a word for us. I'd tootle round to his house of a morning for a lift, late more often than not (plus ça change). My God, pub lunches. I haven't had a job with pub lunches since then. I used to have two plain baked potatoes (just butter) and a pint of Heineken at the Land o'Cakes on Great Ancoats St. I wish they'd let us go to the Railwayman's Club on our dinners now, like the old guard (old guards?) used to do. Nostalgia is intoxicating.

Anyhoo, the reason that era is looming in my memory is a Facebook update from someone else from that time. One of the odd jobs I had around then was at the comic shop (with an odd shift at the neighbouring SF bookshop) outside the corn exchange. One of my colleagues back then is now the booker at the Blue Lounge in Manchester so upcoming gigs there pop up in my Facebook timeline. The Brilliant Corners are playing there in July after recently reforming.

Now, I'm not very musically inclined, but I remember that my then girlfriend's best friend was a fan so we went to see them at the Boardwalk in Manchester and they were great (I've just done a quick Google on the fan, who was brilliant and Cambridge-bound at the time and is now a published Doctor in Clinical Psychology. Sous-performant, moi?). I didn't know a great deal about them other than they were from Bristol and their trumpeter had recently left. So, in this internet age, finding out they had reformed led me quickly to iTunes and me downloading a tiny chunk of my youth. I still find that odd, that little bits of your past have been backed up in the cloud on your behalf, as if a stranger had the foresight to keep a journal for you, knowing there'd come a day when you'd need this stuff.

All of which leads us to Teenage, which was my favourite track. Take it away, OoToobay!

And then, suddenly, we're back in 2014, listening to this on the headphones on the way to work.

More soonliest.

Every Day is Like Sunday

The Sixth of April Two Thousand and Fourteen. Sunday.

Fire up the Half Man Half Biscuit on the Spotify and see what comes out of yer keyboard.

"The nauseating bashfulness of early Diana makes me want to set fire to commemorative tea towels." Poetry, sheer poetry. Lets have a track from Achtung Bono to kick things off.

It can't be a coincidence that soon after I worked out the secrets of the universe with Tarrantism, I went into a spiral of decline. Hasn't happened for a while, but at the rear end of this week I revisited the halcyon days of my early twenties when the thought of interacting with other people would send me scurrying to my bed. Oh, the horror of ringing in sick to whatever terrible job I had at the time. I worked for Customs and Excise for a very short while, adding new rules to ring binders every morning. When you do that for Dungeons and Dragons they call you a weirdo, but this was the bedrock of our tax system. There was a boss who expected you to make cups of coffee for him, a man, Vince, who would use, Vince, your name an inappropriate number of times in a conversation, Vince. And someone I vaguely knew from school. I was spotted, one day, sat on the kerb outside with my head in my hands, prompting concerns about whether I was depressed. I was not - just isolated and bored. When I stopped turning up for work (in the days before I became a responsible parent) they sent folk round to check I was ok, and when they were convinced that I was they let me off the leash and essentially told me I would never work for the civil service again. I don't think that was intended as an act of mercy, but I took it as such.

Hmm, this is all a bit downbeat. Best perk it up with a quick reference back to my Nineteenth Telly Recommendation, Community, and a throwaway gag that took them three years to set up. This compilation of short clips come from the first, second and third seasons respectively.

This is the sort of stuff I seek out when left to my own devices.

I've always been something of a hermit. I enjoy the company of others and certainly don't want to let them down by being miserable when I'm out and about, but sometimes I do shy away from being social. Case in point - this weekend there has been a Science Fiction convention in Scarborough. I booked tickets for it and was even offered some comps for helping out with some of the publicity at the station. But the weekend also coincided with a Family Signing session that had been organised months ago. The conflict of two social occasions put me in a spin and I've ended up attending the Signing session, but then withdrawing to my humble abode with the curtains drawn. I know I'd enjoy it if I went, but I really want a break from other human beings, just for a day or two at least.

Which brings me to Sunday. I'm only just starting Season 3 of Game of Thrones in advance of Season 4 starting tomorrow. It is a Brit-actor-a-thon, isn't it? Blinking Dame Diana Rigg has just shown up!

I haven't been watching Ripper Street, although I've seen the buzz about it, so I didn't know Jerome Flynn was out and about. He's great as Bronn the sellsword in this and I have a lot of time for a bloke who is a patron of the Vegetarian Society and got to Number One with Unchained Melody (a song that has been very kind to me over the years).

 I've been reading some Stewart Lee and AA Milne and catching up on the Richard Herring podcast. Slowly, I can feel my hard drive finishing the last of its updates and coming out of Safety mode. I'll be ready to face the world again tomorrow.

But for today it's back to the telly...

More soonliest.

The Java Jive

The First of April Two Thousand and Fourteen. Tuesday.

When did I become a coffee addict? It wasn't that long ago that I was saying I was back on the tea, but the stuff I've been drinking recently (PG Tips for the record) isn't really doing it for me. And yet I've stuck to it for the most part as I've overdone it somewhat with the coffee recently.

A few weeks ago I was on a late shift at work so I would spend my mornings downing a cafetiere of coffee and enjoying a couple of bagels while watching Game of Thrones. Yes, I've only recently got on that particular bandwagon and for the most part I am enjoying it. I did literally spit out a mouthful of sesame, Philadelphia and proprietary brand Marmite substitute when a horse got decapitated, but other than that it has been very entertaining. Never been much of a connoisseur so my coffee of choice was Sainsbury's half-caff, which might be a bit gimmicky, but I like the way Sainsbury's have a wire strip thing that makes it easy to reseal your packet.

I used to scratch my head trying to figure out how they managed to take out only half of the caffeine. Did they stop the process half way through? Did they take decaffeinated coffee and add some of it back? I had to actually read the label before I realised what actually  went on. The obvious does escape me with alarming regularity.

Add to this all the instant coffee I drink at work. Drinks often go cold as we busily serve the Great British Public with all their ticketing needs so when a fresh brew is on offer I tend to neck the cold dregs and start the process all over again with a full mug. And the week just buzzes along quite merrily until circumstances change and then the crash occurs.

Last Saturday I attended a Family Sign Language day at our local children's centre. Dehydration from various central heatings, plus squinting through my glasses for a couple of hours at the signed presentation, plus a sudden removal of caffeine after a couple of weeks of submersion all conspired to give me the mother of all headaches. Forgive my imperfect understanding of biochemistry, but as I understand it it's the dehydrated body's demand for various chemicals that it nicks from the brain that causes the pain. I'd heard that the potassium et al in bananas could help to mitigate this, but all I had on hand was an apple so I gave that a go instead.

It's fair to say that my body took on some of the qualities of an exciting FA Cup tie - that is to say it opened up at both ends. The pain made me nauseous and an acidic apple didn't help either. After the family signing day I was lucky enough that my pre-ex-mother-in-law could look after Number 2 son for a short while enabling me to get some rest. When she finally delivered her charge to my pale, washed-out visage she was suitably taken aback by my corpse-like appearance that she even offered to stay overnight (at the big house, not my modest flat) to look after her grandson. It was a very kind offer, but I knew the symptoms of my 'caffeine hangover' wouldn't last too long. I returned to my bed, placing a fiver in Number 1 son's hand telling him to sort out chips for tea for him and his brother. This he did, sorting out teatime nicely, only falling down when trying to coax the DVD player to work. I am proud to say that even in my absence, the boys attempted to watch Doctor Who with their chips.

I haven't touched proper coffee since. I really don't want to go through all that again. But...

The tea isn't really doing it. I would kill for a really nice mug of coffee (the best coffee I've ever tasted was from D'aiuto's bakery in New York - home of the Baby Watson cheesecake. And I've just googled it to find it closed last year. Rotten 'eck.). I never used to like coffee. The tide turned with a combination of Twin Peaks and my Then Girlfriend's love of black coffee. Tea is the English eccentric's drink of choice, to the point where it's become something of a cliché now (although I do like an Earl Grey with me cheesecake). One of the many genius things Russell T Davies does when reintroducing the world to Doctor Who in that first episode just about nine years ago is have the Doctor ask Rose for a cup of coffee. He already travels in time and has two hearts - he doesn't need any tawdry quirks (cf with him messing with a deck of cards). Love that episode.

I've been knackered all week too. The weather's getting nice now. Maybe it'll be ok to ease back in with a frappuccino...

Maybe.

More soonliest.

What is Tarrantism?

The Thirty-First of March Two Thousand and Fourteen. Monday.

'Is it something to do with spiders?' asked my pre-ex-wife.

No, it's not. Since I failed to make any money out of VINETICS!, my earlier attempt at forming a c̶u̶l̶t̶   r̶e̶l̶i̶g̶i̶o̶n̶   g̶e̶t̶-̶r̶i̶c̶h̶-̶q̶u̶i̶c̶k̶ ̶s̶c̶h̶e̶m̶e̶   working philosophy, I have found myself pondering the great questions of morality and trying to come up with a code that has some real practical benefits.

To this end I was sprouting no end of nonsense at work on Saturday. It all came about from a discussion that took in the Orange Parade, gay marriage, the futility of war and mature students' eligibility for 16-25 railcards. Out of this potent brew came a few ideas that were immediately tested by a series of dilemmas on that very day. That these ideas all came through is testament to the incipient potency of what I'm calling Tarrantism.

Like VINETICS!, Tarrantism is founded on three basic ideas. The first of these gives Tarrantism its name.

1) Is That Your Final Answer?

Any decision you have to make, just pause dramatically before finally execute it. Ask yourself if you are absolutely sure that it is the right thing to do. If you are still convinced, then good luck to you. Go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine. If you are not, then change your mind! It's fine. It's allowed. It's in the rules. Just give yourself that last opportunity to check if what you're doing is what you really want. Ignore any coughing from the crowd. There may be more than four buttons to choose from (this metaphor has passed beyond breaking point now, hasn't it? Won't stop me, though), but even up to that very last second your course is not fixed. Until the figurative light goes orange. Or something.

2) Meeting Halfway

Look, I'm steeped in gulliblity. You're not going to have to be Derren Brewn (that is how he spells his surname, you know) to convince me of your hare-brained scheme. So I tend not to consider whether I'm being taken for a ride or not. That said, I am unlikely to give you, unknown person who has merely materialised now in order to provide an example, time of day unless you have made at least a bit of effort toward achieving your goal. Or failing that, you show some consideration when you are making your request of me.

Money's the most obvious way of illustrating this, though it isn't always as straightforward as putting numbers on things. For example, I am more likely to give you £10 toward something that costs £20 that you're willing to put up half the cash for than I am to give you all the money for something that costs £10. I might be just as much a mug in either case, but I am content in my own mind with the first scenario. See also: housework, errands and favours.

3) No Fretting

Goodness me, the untold hours I've spent fretting over stuff. Not worrying - worrying is legitimate. Hoping people are ok, that you'll be able to pay the bills, that there's still enough Philly left for your bagels in the morning. Those are things that cause you to act - emotional responses that push you do stuff that has to be done. Fretting is unnecessary concern over things that you cannot affect. Mainly, this is about stuff you've already done. Once it's done, once the light has gone orange, you can't undo it. There's only this one life, this one dimension (if you want me to get all parallel worldsy on your ass) and there's nothing you can do to change what's already done. Oh, you can repair what you've done, you can build on what you've done, you can explain what you've done, but it's done. Past tense of do. And any energy spent on it - especially if it's distracting you from what you could or should be doing - is a waste.

A Thal: post Castle-thump

Now, mention of the name Tarrant always makes me think of the way Terry Nation would try and get someone of that name in his scripts (I'm thinking more Doctor Who here, but I know there was a Tarrant in Blake's 7, it's just that I didn't watch too much of that). So I can't help but think that there should be something in here about how even if you're a pacifist you're allowed to hit Roy Castle if they try and steal your woman (even if they're only trying to make a point) or something. I can't remember if the same point is made in the TV version, but the film is in colour so I think that must be more relevant. That part of it probably needs a bit more work, though.

Enjoy your lives now that I've solved them!

More soonliest.

Having a Day Off

The Twenty-Eighth of March Two Thousand and Fourteen. Friday.

How lovely to have some time off. I will be working all weekend, but here are some of the things that I have enjoyed today instead of doing all the chores I should be doing while I have the time.

I follow Rhodri Marsden (@Rhodri) on the Twitter - no relation. Only found out today that he is a member of a the band Dream Themes who do covers of top TV themes. They've just released their first double A side on iTunes: News at Ten and BBC News. Here's the video for News at Ten:

That's fabulous enough in itself, but then I find out that they used to play with Frank Sidebottom which led me to discover this:

"I've got a good idea; you are absolutely bobbins!" Joy, just pure joy.

Dan Slott is the man responsible for Doctor Octopus' mind being in Peter (Spider-Man) Parker's body this last couple of years or so. Along with artist Mike Allred, he is also responsible for the new Silver Surfer comic that launched this week.

Slott is a big Doctor Who fan and he admits to that being one of the influences on this series. An odd cosmic being sharing the sights of the universe with a human being? It seems such an obvious fit for the Surfer you wonder why no-one thought of it before. Not that this is slavish copy of Who - it's unmistakeably a Marvel comic, just that it shares that same sense of fun and wonder particularly associated with the 21st Century iteration of the series. I think it ought to be my Seventh Comic Book Recommendation.

Had a haircut. That wasn't particularly fun, but it was overdue.

Lunch was egg and chips at the Contrast cafe, just round the corner from my flat. I had an iced finger for afters.

I'm struggling with the level 6 dungeon on The Legend of Zelda. At Christmas, Number 1 and 2 sons were fortunate enough to get a Wii U. This meant that their old Wii was sent into my care. But rather than buy a load of game discs for it, I downloaded the original 1980s version of Zelda from the online store. This is about my speed and although I am not much of a gamer, I'm proud of the fact that I've got this far without any cheats. Seem to be stuck on this dungeon, though. It's very frustrating.

I've been catching up on True Detective today as well. Ah, it looks gorgeous (I'm going to watch ep 4 after I've finished this, with a 6 minute tracking shot that everybody's been raving about), but there is this slightly po-faced "Hey kids, these are quality HBO shenanigans" air to it that is faintly ridiculous. It's very watchable, but it certainly has a very high opinion of itself. The next few episodes will reveal if that's deserved.

I tell you what, those microwave rice packets are a godsend. Tea took three minutes to make tonight.

So, back to work tomorrow. Just thought I'd share a little of what's been occupying my time today. Of course, this has taken a chunk out of my evening, which is a bit annoying. I think I'll put the kettle on.

More soonliest.

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.