So where have I been these last few weeks?

I’ve become affluent and moved to the West End of Glasgow. Little bit of a lie that one. We got the shop and all the legal stuff was finally tied up a week ago. So far we’ve had a front window replaced, the basement floor painted and I’ve hunted down all the water leaks in the pipes that I can find. I’ve only got a few electrical problems to sort and I’ll be happy with the state of the place.

The place is huge. I keep forgetting just how big it is until I get home every night and realise how small my house is.

All our stock has been moved in and put on the shelves so now we’re just waiting on a fridge, our coffee machine to arrive and our sign to be put up and we’ll be sorted. Vonnie is looking at a soft launch for Monday so we’ll go from there.

Here’s a few pics giving you a clue as to how things might look.

It is.

The house is always quiet during the day when the kids are at nursery. We don’t quite get the same peace on those days at the moment though as this last week we’ve had all the staff over working our livingroom until we get the lease signed.

Today seems to be different though. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought today was Sunday and couldn’t work out why. Vonnie thought it was because of the lack of kids in the house and Clare thought it might have been because I was drinking at the wedding last night. It’s not that though.

It’s roughly 10am on a Saturday morning and I can’t even hear traffic on the main road outside. There is the tick of the clock and the hum of my laptops fan as it struggles to keep everything in there cool enough to work. Penny is lying down somewhere and not chasing the cats and the chooks aren’t shouting like their usual selves.

I can only think it’s the rain. It’s not on heavy, in fact I think it may have actually stopped now, but it has dulled all the noise from outside which is a rarity around here. It’s very peaceful.

I miss the kids. Thankfully we’re picking the girls up in an hour or so but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get the boys.

There is one TV Series that has me coming back time and time again.

Every couple of years I rewatch every episode of The West Wing. It’s a big investment in time but that show stand the test of time so well.

Every so often I’ll be watching an episode only for it to finish and then remember that The Bartlett’s are fictional.

The show is so well written, the characters are fantastic and the actors playing them are perfect. A show like this is a rarity and all to often any show that comes close to being as good as this ends up being diluted by the producers and TV stations in the aim to get more viewers.

If you haven’t seen it, and I’m sure there are few but I don’t image that many, then find a copy and watch an episode. I cannot think of a single weak episode so take your pick. You’ll enjoy it.

In passing this morning Nairn said he wanted to go and visit Good Uncle Barry*. He wouldn’t explain why just that he wanted to go. Pretty soon Erica jumped in that she wanted to go and after a brief discussion with Nairn confirmed that they both wanted to go and to go today. No offence to Good Uncle Barry but it’s the first time they’ve actively wanted to go there which set alarm bells ringing in my head.

After they’d had their breakfast I finally managed to get Nairn explain why he wanted to go. Apparently Bad Uncle Barry+ lives in the same flat in Good Uncle Barry’s hall cupboard.

Seriously. Where do they come up with these things?

* Good Uncle Barry was my best man and used to be my boss many moons ago when I worked for Safeway. He’s good in the sense that he isn’t Bad Uncle Barry.
+ Bad Uncle Barry is a completely different Barry. He is the tattooed crazy artist that teaches our kids to swear on sunny days in the park and encourages them to push old grannies into rivers. He’s even got our kids to start drawing up plans for the invasion of Europe and eventually the overall ruling of the universe. He’s that bad.

A while ago Vonnie, whilst doing her daily rounds of the blogs, entered a competition to win a ticket to the 2010 Cybermummy Conference that was being held in London. Time went by until one day she found out that she had actually won and so booked the overnight bus from Glasgow and headed off on Thursday night for three whole days and four whole sleeps away from the family. By all accounts she had a whale of a time judging by her account of the day on Twitter.

The question is though how did I survive? Of course I did. I was helped a lot by the weather though.

Friday was a great day only dampened by the fact Vonnie had took all my change the night before and the local cash machine was out of order. We ended up walking from our house to the town centre via my dentist to pay an outstanding bill, round the shops to kill some time and them on to my parents for a few hours. The kids were knackered when we got home so they had an early night which meant I got to see the football. Basically Friday was made of win.

Overnight, and by that I mean at 4.30am when it was broad daylight outside, a fox decided to have a go at getting into our chicken coop. The noise the hens were making made me thing it had actually got in and it wasn’t until I climbed back into bed after throwing on my dressing gown and running out into the garden to check on them that I realised just what the time was. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep after that.

Saturday was movie day for the kids as it was due to rain at some point during the day. Buckets of popcorn and peanut flavour crisps later the kids had plowed through Spongebob Squarepants The Movie, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo. Again I got to see the football but this time Greer joined me rather than sleep through it.

Sunday has consisted of stopping the kids from killing each other as they were suffering from cabin fever. From late last night onwards all it did was rain until lunchtime and the wind was threatening to lift the cars parked in the street up off their wheels. I also discovered that the rain was being blown into our boilers gas vent which meant there were puddles of rain water in the boiler cupboard. No idea how to prevent that one in future.

So… no kids were damaged in the making of this weekend and I actually managed to get some housework done.

The question is just how better will Vonnie do when I’m down in Manchester later in the year. Please don’t show me up too much dear?

Honest there is one. He just doesn’t come out very often.

I was working my way through old photos on Flickr last night when I came across one that illustrated my photography ‘pedigree’ in such a way that I had to share it with you. Before we get to that however a little history. When I was six my parents gave me an old Kodak 110 film camera which I loved to pieces but I think in all the years I had that I only ever actually took about three rolls of photos with it as I spent most of my time opening the back to trick it into thinking there was a film wound on so that I could press the shutter release and hear it *click*. My brother later got my parents disc camera which caused some jealousy issues but I got over that. I know I had another camera between then and getting my Canon Sureshot for my 21st birthday but for the life of me I cannot remember what it was. My parents bought one of the first ‘decent’ digital camera whilst on holiday one year and I was always stealing it. By decent I mean it had a 1.3 million pixel sensor and I could draw pictures quicker than it could save photos to it’s internal memory. I’ve since moved on to bigger and better cameras but that is where I’ve come from.

For years I would watch Blue Peters photography competitions and wonder why I couldn’t do it. Looking back at this photo though you can see why. I suffered from, and still do, holiday-snapshot-itis. At least 99.995% of all my shots come out looking like someone took it from the inside of a half empty beer glass.

click for bigger image

I had one wall in covered in photographs and I was very strict with how good they had to be before I would put them on that wall. If you look closely you can plainly see even the non-snapshot photos are of the same quality as my snapshots.

Looking back at the photo though it’s basically my life at that time in miniature. From photos of ex-girlfriends and holidays in Majorca to drunken snapshots of my student days and of the hours I would spend in the evenings playing football. The shelves hold everything from my Pratchett and Gemmell books to my MTB glasses. I still cannot remember the hi-fi that is in the bottom left of the photo. It was before I bought my JVC so I’m assuming it was my dads old one with it’s turntable and CD player but I don’t actually remember ever having that one.

Anyway…I thought I’d share.

What’s up next? Movies!

Movies are different for me but that’s possibly down to them being more of a visual thing than music. I have a very definite list of favourite films that very rarely gets updated. Finding a favourite amongst them though is another story so your stuck with a few from that top bunch.

Dead Poets Society
To this day I don’t know what it is about this film that makes me like it so much. It’s slow. One of it’s main characters is a poetry teacher. It sometimes makes me cry. All things I would normally say rule out a film from being in that lucky bunch of movies I call my favourites.

I guess it’s the inspirational side of the film that keeps me coming back for repeat viewings.

Pump Up The Volume
If ever there was a film I could put on and never become bored by it then this is it. It’s not the greatest or most original storyline but I think Christian Slater’s character being the quiet and shy one at school was just to close to home.

Animal House
This one doesn’t need any explanation. When National Lampoon films were good.

I could easily list another 10 films for this list but these will do until the next time I need to pick a favourite.

I need a kick to get writing again otherwise my dyslexic brain is going to turn into a walnut.

A lot of folk have been writing about their favourite song recently and whilst most have struggled to pick one through all the years a handful are in the same boat as myself. My musical tastes change every day and my collection can only be described as eclectic at best. Generally my favourite song is the track that I listen to most but as with everything it’s the context that’s important.

Five years ago I went to the Download Festival and I stood and listened to Velvet Revolver cover Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. It was a warm sunny night and it capped a great day off and even now on evenings like that the song jumps to the front of my head. That isn’t my favourite song of the moment however.

I’ve only recently became a fan of True Blood but the shows theme tune by Jace Everett fits it perfectly. Unfortunately I need to have the opening credits played along side it though as it just doesn’t hit the same chords without it.

Am I the only one that links music to visual cues?

For the following I make no apologies. As with all holiday posts your going to get bored unless your me within the first paragraph or so!

Sunday 13th June 2010. The beginning of the end maybe? We were due to leave at 8pm that night and I don’t think we’ve every came close to hitting our leaving deadlines on any of our trips never mind our holidays. Before we left I had a two hour driving lesson, a birthday party to attend, clothes shopping to sort out as well as actually packing our bags. When I say we managed to get be out the door by 10pm and that we were doing really well I mean it!

Vonnie managed to get through most of the drive with no sleep and so we made it to Portsmouth just in time to park up and get a little rest before checking in and boarding the ferry. I’m still trying to work out whether the six hour ferry crossing was a wise thing. All that time trapped on a boat trying to keep the kids entertained? It would have been a breeze if it wasn’t for the fact the boat had something like six school trips on board. I’ve never seen so many kids running wild without adult supervision.

A quick ‘detour’ through Caen, and by that I mean I can’t read French road maps and so rather than get us onto the ring road and straight onto the motorway we ended up getting lost driving around the town centre, and we were on track. We arrived late afternoon which meant we had been on the go with virtually no sleep for 32 hours by this point. I think I ended up going for something like 40 hours without a single minute of sleep and felt fine.

Tuesday was our first real day here and so we spend it revisiting the supermarket after I’d almost ran screaming from it in a sleep-deprived panic after being unable to read a single product label in the dairy aisle. This time though we ended up spending stupid amounts of money on BBQ-able meat without being sure the BBQ provided for us is actually capable of staying warm long enough to cook the meat through. The afternoon was spent throwing ourselves down waters hoots at the camp sites indoor water fun pool type place. We would be burnt to shreds if this place wasn’t indoors but i get the feeling we’re going to have to get photographic proof or folk back home are going to thing the weather was just rubbish going by the lack of serious tans we’ve got going on.

Wednesday was mostly spent the same way except that myself and the boys didn’t go to the supermarket and we went to the park in the morning. This whole ‘No Swimming Shorts in the pool’ thing really got to me. It’s actually an offence that can see you thrown off the camp site so we were chancing it with the boys but I ended up having to get a set of proper speedo style swimming shorts. I have to say though that on the first day I kept stopping when I went down the slides when I was wearing my normal swimming shorts but with the speedos it was as if I was an Olympic water luge competitor or something given the speed I was getting up to! I know you don’t really need or want a picture of me wearing speedos in your head but I had to put that out there.

It was just past 10pm and everyone was asleep or in bed. I’d not long finished watching the most recent episode of Dr Who with the boys and I’d settled down for a few beers to watch episode six of Luther. My first handful of crisps seen me lose a chunk of tooth the size of a mini-D6. I wasn’t in pain or anything like that but that may be because of the tequila and lime flavoured beer I’d just drank.

Thursday was supposed to be a trip to the local beach and then a drive out to Mont St Michel but it ended up being another day with the kids running around the park and taking them to the swimming pools. They loved the two inflatable bouncy castles until Findlay decided doing a dismount from the space rocket on one of them and landing on his neck was the best idea in the world. Five minutes of tears was how long it lasted but I think it was more a fright that he got than the actual pain that caused it.

On Friday we did the dummy run through to St Malo to find out how to get to the ferry terminal and just how long it would take us. On paper I think we worked it out that it should take us something like 50 minutes as it was about 100km away and most of it was on 130km roads. I’m sure we were still driving about 2 hours later though! We clocked the aquarium on the way into town and decided to get somewhere to sit in and eat lunch. A choice of a million sea front restaurants was before us and we chose a pizza place in a small shopping mall inland. Despite the staff barely being able to speak English and our own french not being being up to scratch we managed to get some food and get a laugh from the staff. The pizzas the kids had we’re fantastic. They had been shaped into a face with the veg being the eyes, nose and mouth and the kids loved them. I on the other hand went for the calzone. Vonnie pointed out that I might have missed the fact it had egg in it but I thought nothing of it. I then cut into it to find they had basically cracked a raw egg over the insides and the cooking process melted the cheese and heated the meat up but the egg was still raw. Tasted damn good though.

Back at the aquarium we wandered around the various displays feeling a little spoiled after our trip to the one in Bologne two years ago. The place is nice and looks really good but as we came to the end of the displays we remembered something the ticket clerk mentioned in passing. There was apparently a submarine ride included in the cost of the ticket. The aquarium was inland so I couldn’t work out how that one worked but sure enough right at the end was the entrance to the Nautibus ride. I still chuckle at that name like I’m a big kid. Naughty Bus. Anyway it wasn’t so much a submarine ride as a giant walk in barrel that you climb into. It’s taken round a route in a pool that has various other tanks looking into it and with it being water on both sides it looks as if the glass isn’t really there. It was a great way to spice up what might have been only an ordinary display if you were to just walk past it in the main building.

We stopped off in Mont St Michel on the way home and like most picture postcard resorts it doesn’t live up to it’s appearance. I should have learned my lesson visiting Carcasonne all those years ago but I didn’t. Everything costs a fortune but added to that your surrounded by a smell i can only describe as centuries of poo and Dettol. And if you want to learn anything about the place you need to fork out even more money. It was nice to visit it though.

Saturday was spent packing and going around the local supermarket seeing who could buy the strangest thing to buy for themselves. The kids bought books in French that they can’t read, Vonnie bought a plant pot and I bought a light azada for the garden. That was going to be fun if customs decided to have a wee look in our car.

Early doors on Sunday we left just in time to make it to St Malo. Despite never actually finding the ferry terminal on the dummy run we got there just as the queue started. This time it was an eight hour crossing but the weather was fantastic and there was no school buses full of kids! Two hours in the car in France and eight hours in the boat and the kids were fine. Fifteen minutes on English soil and Erica was sick all over the back of the car. We still had 8 hours of driving to go at this point but we got home safely in the end.

We didn’t know it until we got there but we really needed that holiday. Not having to be anywhere or do anything by a set time was great. We never really woke up before 10am though and almost everyone except for myself was asleep for 10pm. A well earned rest is what I think you’d call it.

Back in March 2008 I wrote this post for another blog I had going at the time.

It’s been something that’s been going on for a long time in my mind. At what point do you shatter your child’s rose tinted view of the world and introduce them to the harsh reality?

Since the Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh 2005 when I took my step-son along for the day I’ve been trying to work out just how to get it across to them. You don’t want to sound like a parent from the 70′s trying to get their family to eat all their food by saying, “There is little brown babies in Africa that would love to have a dinner like that.” My wife and I have tried to explain it to our eldest but whilst he seems to understand at the time it goes right out his mind two minutes later when Ben 10 comes on the TV.

photo credit: hdptcar

I was listening to Faithless – Mass Destruction the other day and it got me thinking again. There is a fine line between knowing about the world around us and having the harsh realities forced upon you at an early age. I usually find it difficult explaining to children why I work where I work. Without going into to much detail I’m involved in the administration side of the UK Government’s aid program. This means I usually end up trying to tell the kids about the Millennium Development Goals and whilst they usually take in what I say they almost always without fail ask that one question that all parents fear, “Why?” In this case it’s a perfectly valid question but how on earth do you answer it without cracking the shield that all children should have that lets them play in their own wee world unaffected by the troubles around them. And at what age is it reasonable to actually encourage children to get involved. From a personal view I was involved with CND from a very young age thanks to my Grandfather and several other relatives being very involved with them as well as growing up with Live Aid and Comic Relief but I know many that until very recently didn’t even know about the threat of famine every year around the world and were gobsmacked that the UK sent aid packages to the USA after  Hurricane Katrina.

There are many charities around the world involved with poverty/post conflict relief that are sometimes aimed at children. Comic Relief and Sport Relief in the UK are two of the larger ones with things like Children in Need following closely behind them. Their attitude to showing the kids where the money will go is quite a harsh one and I think it is this particular point that I find the hardest to deal with. On one hand I want my children to be care free and enjoy their childhood but at the same time I want to impress upon them the importance of helping others if you can who are in situations far worse than their own.

How do you deal with this issue?

With the shops ideals being all about helping yourself and the political side of me wanting to ‘make a difference for others’ I came right back to this issue. Should kids be left to be kids for as long as possible or should the reality of the world have an impact on them. Findlay has started watching Newsround on CBBC whenever he can. I love Newsround although I think it’s changed considerably since John Craven presented it all those years ago. They still give a very brief look at things like the current oil spill off the East coast of the USA or various problems in Africa or Asia but, and possibly rightfully so, it still keeps the bloodshed and extreme reality out of their view.

On one hand the kids are playing video games and seeing far more violence in cartoons than I seen as a child and I was an ardent fan of Tom and Jerry or The Roadrunner cartoons. On the other there are now TV channels where the kids will never see any violence at all…ever. Which do you promote? I guess I’m still just in shock at a local kid of maybe five years old threatening to smash my then three year old sons head off a wall and stomp on him like he seen on the TV.

Anyway…less looking in and more looking out. I’ve got work to do