This week I'll be mostly blogging on the outside

Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X ...

If you're reading this (which you are), then you're on Blogger.  Blogger has been owned by Google for about a decade.

If you're paying attention (which you may be), you'll notice that the posts on this blog earlier than 2012 are suspiciously similar to my Facebook Notes.

If you're really paying attention (which you're not - I know this from the stats page), then you and the other two readers of this blog will soon realise that most of what follows has been suspiciously posted elsewhere on the interweb.

So why would I start blogging out here, when I had a perfectly good thing going on in there?  Well...

This week I'll be mostly on a boat

"It's very very nice here"
Bown 2002

Right now I should be sitting at home, with my feet up in front of the fire, reading Autosport.  Instead, I'm on a boat half way across the English Channel.

Why?

Well, yesterday evening I should have been sitting on a plane, with my seat-belt on and my seat-back upright, reading Andrew Benson, Freakonomics, and Bel's Randomness on the Kindle.  Instead, I was on a train from Southampton to Chandlers Ford.

Why?

In a word - fog.

The fog has rolled in across the Channel Islands for a few days, and there is mayhem.  All the flights have been cancelled.  There have been no newspapers (or Autosport) since the mail plane can't land.  You've got hundreds of people at dozens of airports all thinking the same thing - catch the boat.  While BA, Flybe and Blue Islands might be making a loss, the cabbies at Poole harbour and doing a roaring trade between station and ferry terminal.

This week I'll be mostly covered in cellophane

"When you wake in the morning,
wake and find you're covered in cellophane"
Banks/Collins/Rutherford 1981

On Sunday we woke up to a world of white outside.  However, unlike the rest of the British Isles, it wasn't snow.  In the space of a day the folks who farm the surrounding fields had got out there, planted the Jersey Royals, and got the covers on sharpish.

I've thought on occasion that I'd quite like to get out there and give them a hand planting up those cotils.  Or even just help getting the plastic sheeting all lined up nice and tidy.  But I could never be a farmer.  On the one hand, I'd love a working environment that depends on the predictability of the seasons, rather than on next quarter's IT budget of whatever financial services institution I'm working for this month.  But the unremitting, incessant, inexorable relentlessness of it!  That would just freak me out.

This week I'll be mostly in a very, very mad world

It's a very, very,
errr, mumble cough...

For years, in fact decades, a generation of us have convinced ourselves that we know exactly what Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith meant when they sang the line at the end of Mad World: "It's a very, very, mad world, halogeon world".  Or something like that.  When singing along in the back of the car, it was always best to cough or mumble at that point, rather than sing it out loud and embarrass yourself.  Conversations in the school playground, or in later years in the back of a Peugeot 505 estate on the A2, would always end badly: "I think it sounds like imagian."  "Imageean? That's not even a word!"  "Well neither is halogeon."

Of course misheard lyrics are nothing new.  There's a whole website (not a very good one) dedicated to the subject at kissthisguy.com.  Yes, yes, Hendrix: "Excuse me while I kiss this guy".  There was also a survey a while back, listing some favourites like: "See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen".

This week I'll be mostly playing with my food

"If you strike me down, I
will ... erm ... cause a mess
more difficult to clear up
than you can possibly imagine."

Well, it was an excuse to buy a few more creme eggs than are necessary...

First there were the Creme Egg tv ads.  These inspired me to make my own Here Today, Goo Tomorrow, which inspired Dave to make the excellent Indiana Jones and the Eggs of the Lost Ark, which inspired me this year to also do a remake of a classic film scene.  So here it is:

Egg Wars - Episode IV - A Goo Hope.

This week I'll be mostly writing again

The pen is mightier...

Erm, hello.  Again.

It's been 7 months since my last 'Mostly'.  In fact, now that I look, I see it's been 6 months since my last vaguely meaningful post of any kind (other than a quick bit of wedding anniversary prose and a Christmas video).

So first, let me say 'thanks' to all of you who wished me a happy birthday 5 months ago.  Sorry I ignored the lot of ya, but I was embarking on an episode of cyber-phobia.  Not for the first time.  The less said about it the better.  Probably.

This week I'll be mostly pressing pause

I'm ... pressing ... play.

"Come in, sit down and shut up" was what my Grandad used to say. We'd go round on a Saturday evening and Kojak would be on the telly, or Hawaii Five-O, or whatever. This was before the days of video recorders; VHS and Betamax were just a twinkle in the eye of some electronics engineers. So when it was on, it was on. If you were watching the telly, you would come in, sit down and shut up.

A decade later we had video. Of course you still had all that mucking about with setting the timer and making sure you wound the tape back to the right place, and remembering to switch the thing off - because it would only record if it was off - doh! And then when it was recording you couldn't watch anything else. So videos were really for taping things that you were going to miss while you were out; You could go down to Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night, nip over to Leicester Square for the midnight showing of RoboCop, come back on the N279 from Trafalgar Square, get home at 3am, watch a bit of Night Network, and still be able to rewind the tape and catch up with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield on Saturday Live before going to bed.

This week I'll be mostly drinking Italian coffee

That's a bit of a small cup.
Pass the half-pint mug please.

Coffee, I've always thought, is bad for you.

I guess it started when I was a kid, when the kind of coffee my mum made - comprising a saucepan of boiling milk poured into a mug over Nescafe granules - would leave me feeling a bit ill. It was quite a few years later before it really properly dawned on me that I was lactose intolerant. Doh!

And then there was that time in 91 when we'd just moved office and I was so close to the drinks vending machine that I didn't even have to leave my seat for a brew. I was getting through more plastic cups of machine coffee than you could shake a stick at. It was only a few weeks later that the doctor sent me to Bart's hospital for a bunch of tests that resulted in some periods of unconsciousness, large quantities of blood being taken, a handful of x-rays, and an inconclusive diagnosis that had something to do with my 'lifestyle'.