Skip to main content

I'm in your hands. Ew!

By the Almighty Goddess Sonia (Better The Devil You Know) – I’m in the ‘Blog Off’! I am therefore, once and for all, completely in your hands. This is a worry, but I do have a catering-sized bottle of that hand sanitizer stuff, and a box of baby wipes.
It’s surprising how quickly a chap with two hats and snow visible through a window gets out of date, isn’t it? To be fair though, I made the quite logical assumption that I’d be out of this competition by February at the latest, but no! Here we are in April, and it’s down to the last two. And one of them, scarily, is me. Still, this is Cumbria, so additional snowfall isn’t out of the question. I could look vaguely relevant again as fast as you can say “Ooo – that cloud looks dark, doesn’t it?”.

Best wishes to my fellow departed Big Bloggerers, a couple of whom I now have the pleasure of knowing through twitter also, and good luck to Darren. Having chatted via That Twitter Thing, it seems we have quite a lot in common, not least of which is a fondness for orchestral-based rock bands fronted by Jeff Lynne. And a complete failure to understand what the rules of this game actually are.

It’s been a fascinating journey. I’ve discussed* lazy recyclers, snow obsessives, the horror of wind chimes, inappropriate use of fog lights, TOTP 1977, vehicles that shouldn’t be allowed on MY roads, the drought in the South, TV journalists and their odd habit of standing outside closed buildings for no discernible reason, idiot drivers, the joys of train travel, the rather amusing thought of me doing actual exercise, death (the two are next to each other in this list for a reason), glimpsed a post-solar storm apocalypse where there ARE NO CAPPUCCINOS, Formula 1, Those honkers the Canada Geese (that went out of date fast, didn’t it?), quarries closing and my meteoric rise to Chairman of the Allotment Association.

(*When I say discussed, I actually mean grumbled rather pathetically.)

You have generously written some very nice things indeed in the comments of these worrying, skull-emptying, exercises, and reinforced my belief that you are all very, very nice (but in all probability, not the sort of person you should surprise suddenly).

So. Who am I? Well, the NW Evening Mail did ask us all to write a profile, but to the best of my knowledge, they were never used. So here’s mine:

The artist formerly known as Jenwis Hamilbutton allegedly works for a charitable trust in Ambleside, but most of his colleagues think he's just there to fix the photocopier or something.

Permanently cheery and optimistic, he is a lover of Formula 1, owns a beard, is addicted to cappuccinos and lies 1/4 of the time.

Born a long time ago, in a galaxy reasonably far away (called Croy-Don), he has lived in both Ox and Berk Shires, and for the last five years has resided in Arnside, despite attempts by an angry mob to have him forcibly removed.

There – what more could you possibly need to know about me? Well, how about this – If I win this thing, I get a column in the paper for the rest of the year. Which means I’ll have to think of a LOT more things to have a bijou rantette about. Did I mention the pile of bits of paper on my desk with random things scrawled on them? I could go on for years...

What happens now is up to you. No pressure then, but I have got all your addresses, and I could lower the value of your house just by standing outside in one of my shirts. Think about it – you know it makes sense.

Hug/friendly but manful pat on the back (delete as appropriate),

A very humbled Peter

This blog post appeared yesterday as an entry in the North West Evening Mail's "Big Blogger" competition. Do me a favour - click on this link to view it on their website, please? Thanks to your clicks, I've made it through to the final Blog Off. AAAAARRGGHHHH!!!!!

(Spot of HM Rock - that's Heavy Metal, not Her Majesty - in the form of Evanescence's "Fallen" from 2003. Mighty fine it is too.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...