The Mutants Are Coming

How do you fancy making a snowman that looks like Sir Alex Ferguson this winter?

Assuming that – unlike last year – we actually have enough snow to make the job viable, it’ll be easy. All you need to do is make a regular snowman and then, when it’s time for putting his nose in place, pop down to any good grocers. I went to my local Asda. Those of you who are posh can go to a farmers market and those who aren’t pricked by a social conscience might find Tesco is good too. They should all sell what you want though.

Buy a purple carrot, that’ll do the trick nicely.

We got a pack of mixed carrots this week. There were some normal-looking orange ones and some that were pale yellow, the colour of turnips. The white ones looked more like parsnips than carrots yet tasted disappointingly normal, but by far the most interesting were the purple ones. They weren’t purple as in ‘slightly tinted’ but purple like the colour of boiled beetroot. Proper purple. They even discoloured the water when we boiled them too. The best bit was when we cut one open though. Through its centre were points of a much more carroty orange, like a starburst all the way through it. It was like a carrot in disguise but with bits of it’s true self peeking through. Beautiful.

And this got me thinking. What else is there that the general public don’t know about? Orange cauliflowers, black apricots, yellow and red striped tomatoes. Big tomatoes that are square so they fit onto sandwiches better when sliced. These all exist and so do many others. We should try them out I guess. My philosophy is to try everything twice: once to see if you like it and again just to make sure that you weren’t just unlucky with a bad batch the first time. But not garlic of any kind, of course. That would be just plain wrong, like iced coffee.

So today’s challenge is for us all to look at things in new ways, re-evaluate things that we’ve come to know and have maybe become a little bored of. Like our jobs, our relationships or our homes.

And carrots.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Ring Out the Bells!

Are you now or have you ever been a man? Have you ever been associated with men in any way, shape or form?

If so, you’ll know what absolute spineless jessies most men can be when it comes to visiting the doctor. They can be the biggest, roughest, toughest manly man ever to walk the earth but when it comes to getting themselves checked out medically they turn to quivering wrecks and go into petulant teenage sulks – ‘I’m not going and you can’t make me, so there’.

I know this because I am a man.

My hearing used to be so good that I could hear the waspy buzz of a Pizza Hut delivery moped half a mile away. I could have poured the beers and got the napkins ready (have I mentioned that I’m posh, for around here at least?) before he’d dinged, let alone donged. And I could certainly hear well enough to work out that I couldn’t hear my Beloved giving me a list of household jobs that needed doing.

But many moons have sailed the sky since then and years of gig going and the onset of middle age have begun to take their toll. I’m losing my hearing but I’m finding other things.

I’m finding that every newsreader in the world mumbles.
I’m finding that I can’t enjoy the fun of screaming abuse at foreign PPI claim salesmen called ‘Steve’ (allegedly) because my phone appears to ring less and less.
I’m finding that modern singers are rubbish because you can’t tell what they’re saying, not like back in my day.

Worst of all I’m finding that Roger Whittaker has taken up residence inside my right ear. There’s a constant whistling in it (young readers, you might want to search out the least-trendy old person you know for an explanation). Or perhaps it’s a high pitched humming. Or maybe it’s the constant ringing of a bell. Whatever it is, it’s damned annoying and it’s called tinnitus.

Some say that I should go to the doctors with it but I’ve been reading on the internet – why should I talk to one G.P. when I have the shared knowledge of the entire world at my fingertips? – and I found that there’s no cure for this particular ailment. Worse still, it’s often linked to hearing loss. Great. So not only will I have what appears to be the world’s only bee that can hum in the G two octaves above middle C stuck in my ear but odds are that I’m going to get deafer too. It’s enough to make a grumpy old man even grumpier.

But still, I should look on the bright side. It’s great for three a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, the time when the local young guns shout their drunken goodbyes down the street. They used to annoy me and keep me awake for hours but now  I can just roll with my good ear to the pillow and zone them out behind the bells and whistles in my right one.

And I wouldn’t mind the ringing in my ear so much if it were some Christmas classic. All together now, “Ding! Dong! Merrily on high….”  –  what, still too early?

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Dedication's What You Need

Lots of brownie points go to anyone who can remember where today’s title comes from.

It’s true though – if you want to be the best and if you want to beat the rest, dedication’s what you need. This summer’s Olympics and Paralympics reinforced that lesson. Those men and women have spent many long years in single-minded devotion to their goal. Credit to all of them, however well or otherwise they did.

There’s an initiative that comes around this time every year. Some go for Movember – the growing of a moustache throughout the month of November to raise funds and awareness for male cancer charities. If anyone that you know is participating in this event then I’d urge you to support him in their worthwhile cause. It’ll make you feel much better when you’re laughing at his feeble attempts at face fur.

I’m not doing the Movember thing though. Whenever I’ve tried to cultivate a moustache it comes up patchy and multi-coloured. It’s like I have a mangy tortoiseshell cat’s tail on my upper lip. Not attractive. Instead I’m taking part in the lesser known and lesser-pronounceable NaNoWriMo; National Novel Writing Month.

The idea is that it encourages those of us who lack commitment to a single project or might be easily distracted from our writing to sit down and just get the damned thing written. The goal is to produce at least a first draft of a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That’s about 1,700 words a day, every day. To give you an idea of how much that is, this blog is 576 words long. I can knock these stream-of-consciousness things out quite easily but when it comes to prose with convincing human characters and a satisfying plotline, well they can sometimes be like pulling teeth. My interest starts to wane and I wander off to a web browser in search of obscure research or try do a bit more work on my family tree. Or shoot some virtual zombies. Anything to avoid the intimidating blank page.

I’m usually happy to produce a thousand quality words in a day though; that’s a decent enough amount. But I love a challenge. As they used to say in an office where I once worked, stretch objectives help you to grow. If it stretches me and I think I can have a go at it, even if it’s a little daunting, then just bring it on!

That’s why NaNoWriMo seems to be working for me. I know that I can write 2,000 words in a day, I’ve done it before when the muse has been whispering in my ear and my fingers have been moving in a tippiddy-tap blur over the keyboard. But to keep that up over a month? Well, there’s the challenge. We’ll see.

I’ve had ideas about an adventure thriller set in a theme park for some time now and have made a few aborted stabs at it, but NaNoWriMo seems to be the vehicle I need to kickstart this project. After seven days I have eighteen hundred words in my file, and I’m regularly backing it up just in case. You never know. It would be a shame to lose them because I’m actually quite pleased with not only the quantity but the quality of the words on screen.

Even if some of them are ‘this section needs rewriting’ or ‘expand this bit!’

© Shaun Finnie 2012

The Goose is Getting Fat

I'm a child of the sixties, which means that I spent much of my formative years in the era of that much maligned musical genre, glam rock. I love a bit of Sweet, Mud or T. Rex, but even I have my limits. And I'm not just talking about the social unacceptability of admitting a liking for Gary Glitter's musical output. 

No, much as I love them I don't want to listen to Slade or Wizzard's Christmas classics while some people are still trying to plan their summer holidays. Like the first cuckoo of spring, Christmas can be said to start when Noddy Holder first bellows "It's Chrissssssssssss-maaaaaaaassssss!!!" from behind the Halloween trimmings in Clinton's Cards. This year he started earning his royalties in the middle of September.

The preparation for Christmas seems to start earlier and earlier each year when kids start emailing Santa the order number for their most coveted toys from the Argos catalogue, but it seems to come around with more frequency too. I could have sworn that it was only ten weeks ago since last Christmas and yet, like Ken Dodd's farewell tours, another one's here already. It seems as though nowhere near a year has passed since the last one.

I have a theory about this. I think that the frequency of Christmases doesn't change as we get older, but the way that we store them in our heads does.

Remember how, when you're very young, summers seem to last forever? The summers in your forties, fifties and beyond go by in the blink of an eye but those when you numbered your age in single figures? They seem to stretch to the horizon and beyond even though logically they can only have lasted the same three months maximum as those of your later years.

I think that it's because our brains only have a finite amount of space in which we can hold 'Summer Memories', like a fixed-size hard drive. So when we're (say) seven years old we can stick massive amounts of detail about the few summers that we can remember in there. We hold on to the smell of a newly painted shed, the lazy drone of a honey bee, the sickly sweet taste of a lollipop. As we age that same hard drive in our brains has to try to hang on to the tiny special memories of tens of summers. It can't do it, so it compresses them, making them all seem the same. A generic summer with just the very special parts standing out. And as they all merge into one big memory then they seem to come around with alarming swiftness.

And, as it is with summer, so with Christmas. An adult lifespan's-worth of them all crammed into a memory box designed for just those magnificent Christmases of childhood when all we had to worry about was how Father Christmas would manage to get into our house since the previous owner had removed the chimney a decade before our birth (don't worry kids; he has a special key).

I tried this theory out on my Beloved. I figured that she'd smile, nod and agree that this must be precisely how our memories work, I must have stumbled upon the reason why we think that there's less time between Christmases now than there used to be.

After all these years together you'd think I'd know better. She just laughed and said, 'No love, they only seem to come around quicker because you're getting old.'

Ah. Maybe that's it.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Divide and Conquer

“Come on, Barnsley! Come on, Barnsley!”

It was Saturday and it was just after three o’clock and young men were bellowing their support for their team. Normally I'd see nothing wrong with that. I’ve spent time at Oakwell, the quaint little football stadium just outside of Barnsley town centre, and I understand the stylised tribal warfare that is the modern game. It's a safe (unless Leeds are involved) outlet for the passions and rages of clans protecting their own turf against out of town invaders. All good clean fun.

The problem was though that it was three in the morning, not the afternoon. And the guys that were doing the shouting weren’t at the ground, they were walking down my street.

As far as I know, no Barnsley F.C. representatives were involved but I don't give a hoot. Actually, as there are quite a few owls living within hooting distance of my house, I'd prefer a hoot or two from them to the loud and rather industrial football chants that dragged me from my slumbers.

So what's the correct response in this situation? It's not listed in my copy of Debrett's. The etiquette was simple in the old days when I was young and dinosaurs walked the earth. There was usually a guzunder close to hand…  (congratulations and apologies to anyone old enough to understand that one).

Should I have politely requested that they keep their noise levels down a bit? I can imagine the response to that would have been quite pithy and Anglo-Saxon. Maybe I should have rhetorically asked them if they knew what time it was? I suspect that - Barnsley Best Bitter being what it is -they neither know nor cared.

I don't need to tell you what I did though, do I? You guessed it: I waited patiently for them to go on their very merry way and lay there for a while before insomnia got the better of me. That's why I'm typing this in the early hours of Saturday morning. I know that in a few hours I'll feel tired again but right now I'm at the top of my game (which isn't high enough for me to get vertigo but it's the best I get) so I may as well make the most of it. And what do you know? I've been churning words out, my fingers flying over the keyboard and even occasionally hitting the letters that I want them too. Perhaps I should put a light on.

I've always done my best work first thing in the morning but I never knew that I could be so productive in the very small hours until recently. This idea of waking up and getting things done in the middle of the night then having a nap later is certainly not what most of us would call normal, but I've found that it works for me whether I want it to or not. Is it wrong? Apparently not. Some academics argue that this segmented sleep is the way that we human animals should get our rest naturally. Apparently we're designed to nod off earlier than most of us do, sleep for a few hours then wake to do something around two or three o'clock before heading back to bed for another couple of hours kip. Indeed it was the norm up until the 19th century so perhaps I'm 'right' in my sleeping patterns and the rest of the western working world is 'wrong'? Hmm, perhaps.

I think it's also quite likely that my sedentary lifestyle combined with a creative mind-set leaves my brain racing while my body hasn't been tired out. I should get some balance and some exercise.

But that's something to consider tomorrow. Right now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off for some sleep. Part two.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Mostly Autumn

Just like Jeff Wayne’s nameless departed lover, I get a real buzz from kicking my way through autumn’s golden gown. I most definitely love this time of year. There is no way that any fallen leaves in my path would ever go undisturbed.

The sudden sharp downturn in the temperature, the early dusks, the primal thrills of Halloween and bonfires – this is by far my favourite season. But apart from clogging up gutters and drains with its wet and rotting leaves, what’s the point of autumn really? When you look closely the other seasons have a definite place in nature. Autumn? Well it just sort of fills the windy gap between the heady delights of summer and the semi-hibernation of winter doesn’t it?

I mean, spring is really useful, I get the point of it. It’s the season of new birth. I can pretty much guarantee that if you were asked to think of an image to sum up spring then you’d conjure up a picture of new lambs happily bouncing about in a hilly green field. They’d almost certainly be gambolling. Has any other creature ever gambolled? It’s like the two words – ‘gambolling’ and ‘lamb’ – are joined at the hip, like ‘lying’ and ‘politician’.

The winter season is a time of cleansing, of killing off the weak and old to make way for all that new growth in springtime. That’s perhaps not such a good thing in nursing homes but really useful in our fields and woodlands. When the trees are stripped bare of their leaves they let the light in to the forest floor where all the nasty creepy creatures that we don’t like to think about can do the kind of work that we want to picture even less – most of it involving chomping on something that’s decaying. It might not be pretty but don’t knock it. We all have to earn a living somehow.

Summer is a celebration, a time for growth and fattening up of all things before the harvest to come at its end. Assuming that summer hasn’t been rained off (and that’s a big assumption) then crops grow tall, people north of Watford try to work out just what the heck to do with Pimms and I try my best to dodge salads for the two weeks or so that we see the sun in England. Summer’s fine, I understand summer.

But autumn? I can’t see where autumn fits into this cycle so neatly. Spring is birth, summer is growth, winter is death. It’s all nice and neat.

I have a theory though. Perhaps autumn’s just there for me to go out and enjoy? Maybe it’s sole purpose is to let us have fun in nature’s playground when it’s not too hot, not too cold and not too crowded. And you know what? That’s good enough for me.

Thanks, autumn.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

All In The Family

We made a big breakthrough this week while researching our family trees. We discovered that my Beloved (whose family have never moved far from a little village near to where I live now) and one of my closest friends (whose ancestors also lived in the same village for centuries) are related. Very distantly related, it’s true, but related all the same. It turns out that he’s the great-grand-nephew of the husband of my Beloved’s great-grand-aunt. On their fathers’ sides. I’m not sure if this knowledge is going to bring them closer but I think it might mean that they’re ineligible to marry.

Why do so many of us feel the need to trace our family trees? Genealogy is the second most popular topic searched for on the web (I think that you can guess what the first is). A recent study found that 84 million of us worldwide are actively searching for our ancestors. Those who want to get serious about it can spend hundreds of hours, pounds and miles tracking down that elusive great-great-great-aunt, about whom the only bit of information they know is that she was the sister of a boy named Valentine and she died in infancy sometime around 1749. Give or take a decade.

And on the other hand why do some of us not care at all? The past is the past, they say, and a family tree is just a list of names and dates, dull and boring like some kind of trainspotting with gravestones? Some people also don’t have the blokey-collector attitude required to spend hours tracking down the missing item, although the highest demographic of family historians are ladies in their late-middle age. Maybe it’s a generational thing too? Certainly more of us start taking an interest in researching our bloodline as we get older.

Not everybody wants to share their family information either. Many people have asked, ‘Tell me about your grandparents and aunties, Granny’, only to be met with pursed lips and a reply of ‘Oh you don’t want to hear about that old stuff. Now come and cut my toenails for me, there’s a good lad’.

My Mum once told me that I shouldn't ask questions about the family’s history if I wasn't prepared for the answers. I haven’t found any particularly juicy stories yet but you only have to watch a couple of episodes of ‘Who Do You Think you Are?’ to know that most family’s cupboards hold a couple of unexpected skeletons. It’s the historical equivalent of ‘Does my bum look big in this?’

Anyhow, so my Beloved is related to my mate. Me? As far as I know I’m not related to the actor Albert or the football legend Tom, even if they had ever learned to spell their surname correctly. But I suspect that I may have famous blood in my veins, even if it’s severely diluted by generations and beer. Some people dream of being related to a pop star or a supermodel perhaps? I’m aiming for one of the angriest, grudge-holding geniuses that this fair land has ever produced.

My mother’s family hail from a tiny village in Lincolnshire. Even now it’s not much more than two streets, a general store and a couple of derelict buildings where the pub and the post office used to be. In the seventeenth century – when just  about every second servant in the area bore my family name and the squire’s offspring – it was even smaller, the only building of any note being the manor house where little Isaac Newton was born. Now in those days people didn't have Sky Movies or X-Box to pass the winter evenings. They had to make their own fun. I reckon that I’m just one broomstick-jump away from grafting my tree to that of the country’s most famous fruit-header. How d’you like them apples?

It’s nice to see where we come from but ultimately I guess that those of us who research our family’s history don’t do it for ourselves. We do it for our kids, our grand-kids, our nieces and nephews born and yet to be. We do it so that they will know, long after we’re gone, that we were here and we cared. And so did those who had gone before us.

© Shaun Finnie 2012