Tag: autobiography

Half a life away

There has been a thing going around that there internet they’ve got these days where people are putting up photos of them at 20. Like all the things on the internet, I have no idea why it started but I decided to try and find a photo of myself at 20.

This was difficult because I am so old. Having recently turned 40, 20 is literally half of my life away. Facebook didn’t exist back then. When I was 20 we had only recently actually got the internet.

I managed to find the photos on this post on Livejournal. For those not old enough to remember, Livejournal was like Facebook except you only chatted to your friends and people were actually nice to each other. You’d also often write long(ish) journal entries and in hindsight it might be another reason why I quite enjoy blogging.

I clearly hadn’t worked out how to take a photo on the camera attached to the computer and also look at the camera at the same time. Although this was also the days of MySpace and not looking at the camera was the cool thing to do.

The photos are probably not when I was exactly 20. The one with the hat and the one with the tie are probably the closest but maybe slightly after. The mohawk came around when I was probably around 24.

I went through a lot of phases when I had hair. There was the Kurt Cobain/Chris Jericho bleached blond long hair and beard phase, there was the Elliott Smith messy long dark hair (probably the hat photo ear), there were a number of dye jobs ranging from orange to pink to something vaguely resembling blue. During some of the Battleska years I had a mohawk cut by our drummer as can be seen in photo 3, which was initially my regular hair colour and then became bleached blonde at some point. After that I had a long untidy goatee beard for a number of years.

It’s fair to say it took me a while to settle into a look.  It was partly enforced by my hair deciding it no longer wanted to be attached to my head.

In a way, my hair and facial hair could possibly be said to be a metaphor for my life. It wasn’t until I settled into my current grade 0 up top and grade 1.5 on the chin that I felt like I started to settle into my life. Or maybe that’s just me reading a bit too much into the significance of hair. Those of us who don’t have it tend to think it’s quite important.

“What were you like at 20?” I hear you not ask at all. Well, I shall tell you…

I was studying philosophy at the University of Kent. Mainly because I had no idea what to do with my life after school and it delayed having to get a job. It gave me a good understanding of ethics, but other than that I have not used it at any point in my life since. I was a year old than most of my classmates as I’d managed to drag out my A-levels to 3 years, so I had good form on putting off employment.

I had recently learned to drive using my student loan to pay for lessons taught by Stuart Lee (not that one) and would drive up to uni, sometimes offering lifts to others who were going to college/uni in Canterbury. Every Thursday I would road trip at stupid o’clock in the morning with Luke, Emma and Paul and we would drive past a sign that said “Caution: Mud On Road” yet never saw any mud. It was usually the highlight of our journey as we were sleepy teenagers.

I was living at home with my parents which was a way to do uni and not get into debt. The levels of debt that were got into at that age however were insignificant to the levels that students get into these days. I think I was in the first year of tuition fees and they were something like £1,500 per year but reduced depending on your parents’ income.

It also seems, from reading a few of my Livejournal entries, that I was a bit of an emo always moping about girls. This was a phase that probably lasted most of my twenties.

Musical interlude

I wrote this for a Getting To Know You thing that my work are doing whilst everyone is working from home and not doing any interacting.

From when I was very little I always had an interest in playing music. I thought I was going to be a rock star when I was playing air guitar in the living room watching Guns’n’Roses on Top of the Pops.

One of my earliest memories is borrowing my dad’s acoustic guitar when I was super little and making what have been a horrendous racket. I’m sure my parents didn’t think it was too much better when I was starting to learn to play for real.

The attached photos are bands I have been in over the last 20 years or so where I have varying quantities of hair on my head and my face.

I started to learning from about the age of 14 and during my school years my best friend and I were in a number of cover bands together. We vaguely started to branch out into writing our own songs but only ever managed to get one into our set.

The first band I was in which played regularly was called Battleska Galactica (top left picture), a ska punk band. The band had been going for quite a while at the time I joined, and I think I was mainly asked to join as I had been driving them to gigs and they felt guilty that they couldn’t pay me. The band was together for the best part of 10 years, and recorded 4 CDs in that time and played all over the south of the country. When everyone started to grow up and move away, we disbanded. Some of the members of the band are still playing regularly under the name Call Me Malcolm. I’m not sure how they do it as we used to get back from gigs in the early hours of the morning but now I like to be tucked up in bed by 11pm. 

When that band split up, I was in a short lived band called SuperPartyFunTimes (top right picture) with three other guys who had been in local bands that had been regularly performing in Kent. We wrote all our own songs based around Arnie or Panini football stickers but we only played around 6 shows, mainly because the world couldn’t handle that much awesome. 

The bottom right picture is of a band called Pirates and Pirates and Pirates. There used to be a festival called Lounge on the Farm in Canterbury and one of our friends was running a stage where they had someone drop out. We borrowed a guitar, formed a band, wrote some songs based mainly around our experiences that festival and performed all in a weekend. 

After a long break from performing, I formed a band called The Cool Kids (bottom right) with two close friends. We are mainly playing covers of songs in styles you wouldn’t expect – for example Marilyn Manson as a ballad or Prodigy as a country song. I think I’d had such a long break because music had started to feel like a chore and this has reminded me why I enjoy playing music – goofing around with friends and pretending to be rock stars. 

With the £250 training budget that L&Q give us after 5 years service, I have been having singing lessons. My current fanbase consists of my 3 month old daughter who enjoys my big hits “Incy Wincy Spider” and “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 3: Get married

<<– Part Two : Get Engaged

I’ve been meaning to write a blog about our wedding for quite some time. The problem that I’ve had before is that there’s so much I could write about, however most of it will be so detailed and personal that it will only be of interest to a very small group of people. So I’m going to try to just talk about the few most significant things about our big day.

Firstly, everyone says it’s the best day ever. I’m often reluctant to believe what everyone says about things. Everyone said that Napoleon Dynamite was great but that’s an hour and a half of my life that I’m not getting back. Everyone says that pineapple on pizza is wrong but it’s the best pizza topping by far. Everyone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. However in this instance, it turns out that everyone was actually correct.

The whole day was spent seeing our friends and family and they were all so happy for us (or just wanted a free meal). It’s just like having a massive birthday party for all of your birthdays at once. It truly is the best day ever. The main downside to this is that there is a limited time and if you’ve invited a large number of guests it won’t be possible to spend a lot of time with them all. It is important to not worry about this. Spend your day with who you want to spend it with – whether that is the people you see all the time, those that you don’t see because they live so far away or a combination of both of them. It is easy to get pulled in 100 different directions. One of the best bits of advice we got was to make sure we spent a bit of time together to enjoy the day. You could potentially spend most of the day barely seeing the person you’d just married so grab a moment or two together when you can.

Obviously the wedding day doesn’t just happen. The day involves a lot of build-up and preparation. I actually really enjoyed planning. I’m very much the planner. After the proposal Jo told me – “right, that’s my bit done. Now you need to plan it!”

In reality it was still shared. I came up with a couple of options and discussed with Jo who would then help to make a decision. One thing we were trying to do which I really recommend is to make it feel like your day. Make it feel as personal as possible. We had zombies, Lego, Jane Austen and rowing boats as these are the things that we enjoy (between us – please don’t take this as any endorsement of rowing on my part). 

We were slightly worried that it wouldn’t all go together but as soon as I got there and it all looked awesome I relaxed. Everything just felt right. Not that I expected it to feel wrong, but we’d arranged lots of different things as separate decisions and had no idea what it would all look like when it was put together. I know it will be different for other people but that was what really helped me to settle into the day. All of the planning came together and there was nothing for me to worry about any longer. Getting married seemed really easy after that! 

Another sign of the personalisation was the fact that ours was the only wedding I’ve been to where there was a mosh pit. We were very particular about the music. We had a DJ provided by the venue who had lots of suggestions about things he could do but we were very clear in our minds what we wanted. We gave him a playlist of songs that we knew our friends would dance to and let him improvise a little around that but we did have to reign him in a bit around other stuff. This is totally fine. Everyone realises that it’s your day and that it needs to be how you want it to be. 

The day itself was not as much of a blur as I expected it to be. I’ve got a good memory of a lot of things about it. 

Whilst I know the bride will be excited about getting ready and making themselves look amazing, they miss out on one of the bits that was most enjoyable for me, which was getting to greet everyone as they turned up. I also had to shout at some people for taking drinks into the wedding area. Apparently if that happens the wedding might get called off. I’d imagine that the official people don’t often follow through with that threat, but I wasn’t taking the chance.

Of all of the day, the ceremony is what I remember least about. That’s the only bit that seemed to go by really quickly, and that is possibly to do with it being the most important bit and me concentrating on doing all of our bits right. We had two friends pick awesome readings, which really suited the whole feeling of the day. We wrote our own vows. It seemed important to us that we told each other how we felt in front of a bunch of people. Public speaking is scary, but telling the person you love how you feel on your wedding day is surprisingly not so. We wrote our vows on a bit of card which I pulled out of my sporran to laughter. I’m not sure exactly where else I was supposed to have kept them. It was nice to later discover that a friend had filmed the whole thing on their phone which they sent to us and we were able to watch it through.

As I have written previously, we both changed our name upon marriage. As part of the signing process, we also signed deed poll forms.  A few weeks later, Jo had to re-sign them as I had told her to sign in the wrong place. Oops. That’s all sorted now and we both have a new name.

After the ceremony, the rest of the day is basically socialising, which is quite easy when everyone is there to wish you a good time. The main structured bits after that involve everyone staring at you, and it is easy to get nervous about them. I was much more nervous when I was a best man at my brother’s wedding, however. I think there is a lot more pressure on the best man to be funny and/or entertaining. I returned the favour to my brother and he delivered an excellent best man speech complete with a PowerPoint presentation. 

As we believe in equality, it was decided fairly early on that Jo was going to do a speech and hers was great and funny, and I was annoyed because I had to follow her! There is not much pressure on the groom’s speech, though as you’re supposed to be quite soppy and I was pretty good at that.

The most important things of all are a) we got married and b) it very much felt like our wedding day. We had managed to personalise it and the memories will stay in our heads forever.

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 2: Get engaged

Nothing to do with us getting engaged but a nice photo as we desscend Snowdon.

<–Part 1: Fall in love

[This is copied from what wrote in my super occasionally kept journal on the 8th of August 2016]

I am now engaged to be married! This is very exciting, although it is taking a little time to sink in as, although I always thought that this was the path that me and Jo were on, the fact that we have taken another step along it is awesome. We have decided to take a little time to enjoy the feeling before we start with the planning.

We had previously discussed that Jo would be the one to do the proposing. This is for a couple of reasons – firstly that I would have done it far too soon.

Secondly, and more importantly, we both believe that we have been living in a male dominated society for far too long. Why should it be that men are the ones who decide when to get married and have all the power in relationships? The only way to change this is by small individual gestures to attempt to change it.

On Friday night (5th August), I got home from a day of watching cricket in the sunshine to find that Jo had made a candlelight dinner for us. I knew that she was arranging dinner but we usually eat in front of the TV so this was a nice romantic addition to my evening.

We had egg wrap things – I’m sure there must be a technical term for these but I don’t know what it is – and then I offered to do the washing up. This is the point when I started to twig that something might be up, as Jo told me she wanted to enjoy the ambience.

A few minutes later, she told me she had a present for me, and that there was a treasure hunt I had to go through in order to find it. She had placed the clues in significant places – for example, one was by our guardian deity, Thor.

After some searching, I had worked my way through the six clues and returned to her with my present which she gave to me whilst telling me all the reasons she wanted to marry me as I cried tears of joy. When she asked me to marry her, I said “of course I will.”

The rest of the evening was spent talking and cuddling and enjoying being engaged before we started to tell people the next day.

Part Three: Get married –>

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 1: Fall in love

Falling in love, they say, like breaking up is hard to do. Or at least I could have sworn that was a saying. Or at least in a song. Having done a Google, I now think that I’ve probably made it up. Which is annoying as I was about to disagree with it. So now I’m just going to disagree with something that possibly has never been said by anyone ever which makes me look a little bit weird.

Falling in love with Jo was possibly the easiest thing I’ve ever done. And I think that’s probably how I knew it was right. After our first date she thought to herself “I wonder if I’ve just met my husband.” She didn’t tell me that until way later as she didn’t want to come across as crazy. I’m not sure I would have thought she was (although at that time I didn’t know how addicted she was to rowing) because the first date was basically perfect and it wasn’t long before I was thinking the same thing.

It is possible that the first date went so surprisingly well as I didn’t have any expectations going into it. I had been doing online dating off and on for a good few years and whilst a few of the dates went well, the majority seemed to be less than average. As someone who has a reasonable understanding of maths I know that this is statistically impossible. The whole online dating thing could fill up several blogs on its own. There is a lot of time and effort that needs to be put in to even establish any sort of meaningful communication. Whilst I knew a few people who had met their partners online, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that I would do so too and therefore I went into our first date not really expecting anything amazing.

After that first date I changed my mind quite quickly. We went for a drink at the now non-existent Googies before taking a stroll down to Folkestone Harbour where we sat near the mermaid watching a storm over the Channel (Thor really helped a brother out), ate cake (Rocky Road which has marshmallows in which I hate), talked (about castles and music) and eventually kissed. We clicked instantly and there were no awkward silences or the frantic scrambling around for conversation topics that can often plague first dates.

I was very excited to keep in touch and arrange a second date which also went well. We went to a Tapas bar and then for our third date, I persuaded Jo to go to the cute little cinema in Folkestone to watch a film I’d heard good things about (but not heard what the plot was). It was called Gone Girl which – in case you were wondering – is not a particularly romantic film. Afterwards Jo did promise to never frame me for her murder though, so that was a positive. She’s kept that promise to this date.

Despite my catastrophically unromantic choice of movie, things continued to go well. It just felt so natural. To repeat a bit of the speech that I gave at our wedding, when I was single I had often asked my friends who had got married how they knew they’d met the person they were going to marry. Their answers were varied – one said they couldn’t imagine finding anyone better, one said that they made each other better, one said they made everything better even the bad stuff and another said that there was just no bullshit.  It was near the start of our relationship that I realised that all of those were true about me and Jo. If anyone asked me that question now, I would say that I knew I’d marry Jo because it was just obvious that I would.

Why was it so obvious? It was obvious because it was obvious. Which I know is a tautology but so what? Jo and I each have our own things but we also share in each other’s things at times. We make each other laugh. We make each other smile. We have lots of fun. Jo is an amazing human being – she is fun, funny, caring, thoughtful, adventurous… and exactly the person I was looking for.

Part 2 –>