Freshly Spilled Thoughts

There’s a devil on one shoulder and an angel on another…

We’ve all been there.

The devil on one side of my shoulder loves beer, italian wine, chicken balti, chinese takeaways and stolen kisses.

The angel loves exercise, matcha tea, water, vegetables and hugs.

Being an angel all the time is boring and the devil wants to come out and play at night.

That is the hardest time of day for me to stick to the plan (I do sort of have one)

So I have to distract myself or get busy.

Distracting only works for so long, so this is the best time of day to do exercise.

You can’t do naughty things when you’re sweating your conkers off on a treadmill.

While you’re not focused on how good Primitivia tastes or thinking about succulent prawns in sauce, you can stay on track.

Can’t do it every day though…

So Monday-Thursday I’ve decided to be an angel unless I’m being super sociable.

Fridays and Saturdays I’m going to let the devil win.

Haven’t decided on Sundays yet. Flip a coin.

Do I still want Yorkshire pudding with a Sunday Roast? Hell yes.

My favourite time of year in real life is probably Autumn.

But in films, Winter wins by a country mile…

The reason being?

I’m a sucker for SNOW on celluloid.

Who can resist the snow in Fargo, coupled with Canadians walking around with coffee cups, saying “Oh Gee“.

There’s something just so quaint about it.

Charlie Brown with snow in? Sign me up.

Imagine hanging around with Snoopy and Charlie Brown on a snow laden day.

Stop it, I’m getting excited.

Woodstock as well. OMG.

Gremlins + Snow = Yes Please.

If I scroll through films and I find a good one with snow in, it’s better than being offered a Ferrero Rocher by Roger Federer.

I don’t know why that is, but it’s a thing.

Snow is sort of sexy as well. Probably not so much practically, but it just looks so beautiful.

You just have to do the sexy bits before it all turns to sludge and you develop hypothermia.

Even novels are better if they are written looking out of the window at snow.

I’d buy a manual typewriter just to add to the effect.

“Dont mind me, I’m clattering away on a typewriter whilst it’s snowing and it’s wonderful.”

I must be the only person in the world that was jealous of Angela Lansbury solving murders with a manual typewriter in inclement weather 🙂

I am shocked and saddened today to hear of the sudden passing of the snooker player and commentator, John Virgo.

I know snooker is a boring ‘dry’ sport to a lot of people, because it drags on for hours and that can feel like watching paint dry.

Totally get that perspective and if anyone reading this thinks it’s the most boring sport in the world, I get that too.

Snooker is very much a slow burn, cerebral drama thing, but it was often on when I was a kid and I still remember the end of the 1985 final with Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor.

The day that final was on, as a kid I wasn’t into it really, so I was in the back garden on the swings with a girl who lived over the road. For some reason as a kid you can garner endless entertainment from just seeing how high you can go on a swing.

The thing is though, the final went on for hours and my parents were watching it, so when it was too late to stay outside, rather than go to bed they let me stay up and watch it. At the time, to me it was just better than going to bed early 🙂

I think it must have gone on to just after midnight or something like that. It’s one of those funny things you don’t forget if you watched it at the time.

Everyone wanted Davis to lose and were rooting for Taylor and his strange looking spectacles.

So I’ve never gone to a snooker match or anything, but I did go to 40th anniversary at the CORE theatre in Solihull two weeks ago to listen to a few anecdotes from Davis, Virgo and Taylor.

I never thought 2 weeks later I’d be writing this about John Virgo and that the only snooker related show I’ve ever been to in my life was probably his last.

He was on good form that night and there were a few laughs, so I was glad I went in the end.

Some songs just sound better when you’re in the car…

On the way back tonight, “When Doves Cry” came on and it reminded me how much I like some Prince songs.

Like Raspberry Beret…

Prince wasn’t even on my radar back when my sister used to listen to him.

One day she left an album by a sunbed, so I put it in the CD player to see if I liked any of the tracks.

I skipped a few until I got to Raspberry Beret

That was the song that switched me on to Prince…

Raspberry beret
The kind you find in a second hand store
Raspberry beret
And if it was warm she wouldn’t wear much more

Then there was ‘1999’ before we entered a new millennium.

2000, zero-zero, party over, oops, out of time
So tonight, I’m gonna party like it’s 1999

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this
So sue me if I go too fast
But life is just a party
And parties weren’t meant to last

2000 seemed so far away and futuristic in 1996. Surely we’d all be on hoverboards by the year 2000 😉

Little Red Corvette, Sign O’ The Times and Delirious are 3 more that would get onto my playlist.

A guy in my year at school was mad about Prince. You know back in the day, when someone liked a song so much, they would offer you one half of their headphones for you to listen. You’d put it into your ear and the volume would be so insanely high, it would blow your eardrum to pieces in a millisecond.

We used to call him “Two Cans”, because for some strange reason he always seemed to have two cans of coke. One in each hand, like John Wayne if he’d given up gunslinging and developed an addiction to fizzy drinks, whilst embracing a future with type 2 diabetes.

It was the weirdest thing.

I’m not quite sure why one can wasn’t enough, but he definitely deserved his nickname.

“Oh look, it’s two cans.”

Everyone just knew who we meant, because inevitably as he approached from a distance on a sugar high, you could make out a silhouette of him holding them.

It was like his trademark 🙂

I was checking my email earlier and I got a notification that I won a competition I didn’t know I’d entered.

When I say, I won. I came 19th (LOL)

I know it sounds like I’m making this up, but I’m not.

And you’ve never known me tell a porkie-pie on this blog have you:

“Hi,
Congratulations! You’ve won a prize in our latest contest.
Position: #19
Points Won: 2000
“Effort pays off—and today, it paid you.”

I won 2000 points. Now if that was $2000 the next round of drinks would have been on me.

So then I thought to myself,

“Okay, what does 19th place and 2000 points get me?”

A reasonable thing to think.

So I checked out the prizes for their monthly competition which appear to be cash:

1st $10,000.00 <—- Dance around the living room naked with a party whistle.
2nd $3,000.00 <— Drinks are on me.
3rd $1,500.00 <—- Book the holiday but don’t go crazy.
4th $1,000.00 <—-  Still more than most get on Deal or No Deal these days
5th $500.00 <—- Not bad
6th $400.00 <— Okay
7th $300.00 <—- Better than a kick in the teeth
8th $200.00 <—- Pays for a filling when you’ve been kicked in the teeth
9th $150.00 <—- Come back next week when you can afford the filling
10th $100.00 <—- Meal out
11th $50.00  <— Pizza
12th $50.00 <— Pizza
13th $50.00 <—- Pizza
14th $50.00 <—- Pizza
15th $50.00 <—- Pizza
16th $50.00 <— Yes it’s me writing Pizza
17th $50.00 <—- Pizza again
18th $50.00 <—– Pizza is on the way
19th $50.00 <—- It appears I’m here. Pizza Level Guy. 
20th $50.00 <— Indian takeaway. I only wrote that because I was getting bored of writing pizza. I think I’d prefer an Indian meal. I should have wrote that instead. Or Chinese. I’m not going back to edit it now.

The interesting thing is I’ve just come 19th in a competition I didn’t know I was in and I’ve achieved takeaway Pizza status.

The world is a funny place. If you’re taking it seriously, you’ve got to go for top 5.

Imagine…

“Did you do anything nice today?”

“Yes. I just won $10,000, like the rock star that I am”

“Did you know you’d entered?”

“Yes, but there was this other guy that came 19th and he just ended up with a pizza. The schmuck” 

Just call me the fast food dial-up don.

Can’t say I’m a big fan of Stereophonics. I don’t own any of their albums but one track I wax lyrical about is Dakota.

An intro/hook that sets the stage perfectly, coupled with high energy and timeless lyrics…

Thinkin’ back, thinkin’ of you
Summertime, think it was June
Yeah, think it was June
Laying back, head on the grass
Chewing gum, having some laughs
Yeah, having some laughs

You made me feel like the one
Made me feel like the one
The one
You made me feel like the one
Made me feel like the one
The one

Drinking back, drinking for two
Drinking with you
When drinking was new…

It’s February already. How did that happen?

I’ve only just got the memo 🙂

Last night I watched Saltburn. I liked the Oxford setting and the uni stuff, but WOW how dark is that film.

Dark, even by my standards and I’m at Inside Number 9 level, so I’m a hardened veteran of programme darkness.

Not the prince though. That’s Ozzy Osbourne 😉

Darker than a dark thing in Winter, I’d say.

You have to watch something like Planes, Trains and Automobiles after that as a palette cleanser.

Or an hour of Lee Evans (anyone missing him yet? He came back for a Harold Pinter play and has become a mythical unicorn of comedy ever since).

One of the nicest guys I’ve ever encountered out there in Cyberspace is a podcaster called Andy Godoy.

In this particular podcast he covers Saturday morning cartoons on TV in the 1980’s:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4yWQpKDNKzKygq7F8OLgoz

Back when COVID happened I used to listen to Andy when I was training outside.

All the gyms were closed at the time, so I’d put Andy on and just exercise with what I had available.

One night I trained outside looking at the stars, listening to Amy Winehouse on EP with The Specials.

It was epic in its own little way.

Going back to those Saturday cartoons on TV in the 80’s.

I can’t decide what my favourite cartoon was of that era, but I always liked Dungeons & Dragons.

They were a big deal for me back then as well. I’d get my cornflakes for breakfast and I had a netherland dwarf rabbit called “Bubbles” (he was already called that when I got him, so I carried it on).

He was a black nethie. He had bags of personality with so much character. I had rabbits after that as well, but he was my first and really, will always be my favourite.

I used to let him out running in the living room and he was so happy to be able to run and be around me, he’d do massive bunny hops, jumping for joy. After that he’d run up and sit on my shoulder while I ate my cornflakes, watching those Saturday morning cartoons.

I had him for 10 years until I was 19, all through my secondary school days into college and even as far as my first car which was an MG Metro with a pull-out choke (lol).

He was always there. The Saturday morning cartoons were great and so was he.

Just like Samuel L Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, “Personality goes a long way“.

If Carlsberg made bar staff…

It doesn’t look like much, but I spent quite a while setting up the contact page on this site.

I tried to keep spam on it down to a minimum, but the odd bit gets through the cracks. I keep getting one from someone called Leepep (what sort of name is that).

Anyway, other than that it works like a dream so I am sort of proud of it.

The amazing thing is people can messsage without even needing an email address, which is stupendous even if I do say so myself. I still get the email notification.

I tested it earlier:

As you can see it works perfectly. I included my email but I didn’t have to.

After writing that I thought I should check doing it without…

I got a message from someone called Ken telling me how I could improve my blog. Go away Ken.

I wrote this 14 years ago but I’ve always been somewhat protective of spiders…

I was at a girlfriend’s house one day in the living room, when all of a sudden a big spider appeared from under a chair.

She said, “Oh that’s just George”

“George?” (I was amused by the specific naming convention)

“Yes. He’s in a band!“, she replied.

Maybe he was! In my head this gave spiders a lot more personality.

So ever since then I always imagine spiders being in some kind of rock band, with the lead vocalist inevitably being called George.

I sometimes wonder what they get up to in rehearsals.

One of my pet hates is waking up before a dream has concluded.

You can never go back to finish the dream off, which means it is unresolved.

“For fucks sake, I was enjoying that dream”

Sometimes I have tried to go back to sleep to pick up where I left off, but I can never quite get there.

Then you quickly forget what it was all about unless you write it down quickly or spend a while thinking about it.

My mate had a dream once about someone with a really long tongue chasing someone else around a caravan.

I didn’t ask them to expand further.

AI came back with one of the best answers to date: “This one’s just your mate’s brain messing about like a drunk improv comic at 3am.”

Novak Djokovic has made his way to the Australian Open final at the age of 38.

The critics had written him off.

You know someone who hadn’t written Djokovic off?

Himself.

The easiest thing in the world is to be a critic.

It’s far harder to walk the walk than talk the talk.

Critics just dispense opinion. They don’t shape or change the world.

They just trade in volumes of air that end up being written down in tabloids and editorials.

At best their opinion is an educated guess.

Society is too quick to write people off. We seem to love doing that don’t we?

We get bored when someone is brilliant at what they do and we hope they will lose. We want the drama.

When they start losing, we want them to start winning again.

The Brits in particular loves rooting for the underdog.

It’s something that will never change because it’s how the human condition works.

What we should be doing is marvelling and appreciating those at the top of their game, because they earned it.

A genius is only interesting if they are flawed or troubled.

People love Ronnie O’Sullivan because he’s a troubled genius.

People love stories of Oliver Reed doing crazy things, when in fact he was a very fine actor.

People loved George Best because he was great at football then drank himself into oblivion.

Part of the reason we love this is because we identify it. None of us are perfect, we’re just muddling through the best way we know how.

Even the ones we think have got their shit together are just winging it.

They just do it in plain sight.

When someone is doing exceptional things, at some level it’s nice to see they are flawed too. I think it makes us feel better.

So we’d rather hear about the time Oliver Reed chased Alex Higgins around the house with an axe and the occasion he cleared a blocked pub chimney with a shotgun.

It’s a lot more interesting, not to mention the fact we love a bit of gossip.

Did I ever tell you about the time…

A bloke who lives near me, who shall remain nameless, got shacked up with this woman who was the mother of his sons girlfriend.

To me it seemed like the most unlikely of arrangements.

But whatever works I guess.

Until it doesn’t.

It seems that this has been the case here, as he’s met an old flame from the past and spends most of his time with her elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the woman he got shacked up with continues to live in his house.

I can’t get my hat off.

He recently called the old flame, “The love of his life” and he’s hardly ever at home.

I can’t help but feel sorry for the woman who is living in the house still. She must get pretty lonely and I don’t know the ins and outs of it all, but you can’t continue to live that way.

Something has gotta give, right?

Ultimately he’s going to end up with this old flame for good and he’s going to move on with his life.

What happens in between is just marking time.

Ooh, that almost sounded eloquent. I must have had a good nights sleep 🙂

But before I go…

The 3rd car I ever owned was a white Peugeot 205 GTI 1.6 exactly like the one below…

I fell in love with it as soon as I drove it and my neurons will never forget it.

The guy selling it was a right slick Harry type, but I was too young to care.

I counted out the money and drove home, smelling strawberry air freshener and finding it hard to believe I’d just bought this thing.

Anyone that has never owned one of these won’t get it, but it was the highlight of my day for a number of months.

My drive to work and back became an experience instead of an endurance.

My spare time was filled with wonder. The dullest of expeditions became something quite extraordinary.

Most of the time a car is just a machine, but sometimes they sprinkle a bit of magic onto them and they become so much more.

I don’t know how they do it. I just know it’s possible because I experienced it.

It’s a relationship of sorts, as weird as that sounds.

It’s the same with people.

Most just tick the boxes as they amble along, then one captures your imagination and makes you stop in your tracks.

That’s why I always say magic is real. You might not be able to quite understand why but when it’s there it’s undeniable.

On that note I’m orf to enjoy the weekend. Ciao.

In the late 90’s I went through a phase of entering competitions.

I won quite a few different things.

One day I got back home from work and a parcel was waiting for me.

I excitedly opened it only to discover a pair of hearing aids.

I asked around to see if anyone wanted them, but nobody appeared to be listening 😉

One day I got a letter from the Royal Mint saying I had won their competition.

I had never won a big prize in my life before, so I thought it was a setup. I didn’t believe it.

One phonecall later, I was more convinced.

Cut a long story short I won £2700 at the Royal Mint in 20 seconds.

Not a bad earner, as Arthur Daley might say.

One bloke had won the national prize, which was 20 grand. At the end he collapsed on the floor.

I stayed in touch with him for a while. He used to send me nostalgic memories of TV shows like the Clangers. I’d never watched the Clangers – I was more a Fraggle Rock kinda guy 😉

Can’t even remember his name now, but I’ll never forget the look on his face when he’d finished shovelling 20 grand in coins into a barrel.

I wonder what he did with the money.

There was one more guy who won a prize. His dad went with him and his father was a really emotional guy. He just kept saying, “This has been a great day. Nice to see good people win for a change”.

He was nearly crying with joy and it wasn’t even his money.

Meanwhile, after collecting the prize, Dean got his glasses, jacket and motorcycle before riding off into the sunset.

Hasta La Vista, Baby.

Haddaway once said, “What Is Love.”

Although it’s universal, I think it means different things to different people.

It’s a bit like eyesight.

Everyone thinks they are looking at the same thing, but there’s no way of being 100% sure because you can only see what you can see.

I think, though, we can all agree that love is unconditional.

For me, love is something that never goes away, whether that’s for family members, friends, or people you’ve connected with in life.

Some may argue that it’s like a tap… that it can be switched off or replaced. Personally I disagree with that school of thought.

I don’t think love is a choice. I think it’s a thing.

Too powerful a thing to make a conscious decision about, because it comes from the heart.

People don’t do a very good job of explaining it, but in the purest form it’s unconditional.

I loved my Grandfather then, just as I do now. After all, he was my Grandfather.

More than that though, he was also a role model, and over 30 years later he’s still in my thoughts. He’ll be in my thoughts until I sputter out.

That’s just one example.

When you cut through everything in life, love and people is all there really is. That and our imaginations.

The rest is just made-up stuff that isn’t really important, even if society would have you believe it is.

I’m not sure there is a greater achievement in life than two people who ‘get each other’.

The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and the world looks just that little bit more colourful because of it.

For those that haven’t got there yet, you can never stop believing because you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

My sister had a best friend who went into hospital a couple of years ago and sadly, he never made it out the other side.

But she still thinks he visits and watches over her. Who’s to say she’s wrong?

Maybe he’s never gone away.

Humans have an amazing ability to seek comfort even when the person they love is no longer around.

Happy Friday.

In boxes of Quality Street why do they put the ones with soft centres like strawberry and orange in there?

People avoid them… a bit like land mines.

If you end up with one of those, it’s like you’ve won a shit prize.

Everyone knows people are only interested in the purple ones with nuts and caramel in them.

I’ve always liked Richard E Grant. It took me longer than it should have to watch the film, Withnail and I, but I got there in the end.

It became a big hit with students. So many good quotes in that film, but here’s the one I always remember:

“Withnail: Balls. We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now. ”

Withnail: I’ve some extremely distressing news.
Marwood: I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything. Oh God, it’s a nightmare, I tell you, it’s a nightmare.
Withnail: We’ve just run out of wine. What are we going to do about it?

He was recently interviewed about his late wife, Joan… and this part really got me:

‘I feel fulfilled and sustained without feeling like I’ve lost my better half, which I have.’

The actor also revealed he is still so in love with his late wife that he emails her each night.

Richard said: ‘I have no woolly spiritual delusion that she’s hearing this, or that I’m going to get a response, but it somehow keeps the connection going.

‘So I write to her – “Dear J, today would really have amused you…” It makes it feel like that person is still there – it’s an ongoing conversation.’

He still emails her even though she’s no longer around in physical form.

That’s what LOVE is. It finds a way of transcending.