Fingers Crossed...

...but I think I may just have fixed my Blogger template. What a palaver!

For The Day That's In It

Today is, apparently, World Mental Health Day. It's crazy that I didn't know that.

Okay, we've got that out of the way.

I just nearly typed "people fortunate enough to have good mental health need to cop the fuck on", but it's not about that. It's about realising things like depression affect more than 350 million people of all ages, and in some countries fewer than 10% of those who need it receive treatment. We're not talking about moodiness here, or that dude at work who's as crabby as hell in the mornings before he's had three coffees, I'm talkng about The Black Dog - real, clinical depression. The sort of thing that, if left unaddressed, has the power to turn bright, charming, intelligent people into uncommunicative agoraphobes. 

Now, if you're sat there muttering under your breath "They should pull themselves together. In my day etc etc" then I was wrong earlier - you do need to cop the fuck on. Depression isn't a lifestyle choice and it's not something that people can always overcome without medical help. Even with help, it may be something that's "managed" rather than "cured". Unfortunately, even reaching out for that help still carries a certain amount of stigma. 

Do yourselves a favour, people. Look after yourselves. Yes, mens sana in corpore sano by all means but be aware and be understanding. Don't be too hard on yourself. Sometimes the most grown-up thing you can do is ask for help when you need it. 

Missed!

I have the feeling that there's something I was going to say here. Can't for the life of me think what, though.

If it were earlier I could maybe sit here and waffle on in the hope that whatever-it-was would come back to me. As it's now pushing midnight I probably shouldn't be doing that now, though. More's the pity. This could be the moment when a great work of literature goes unstarted or a profound insight into the human state is missed.

Both of the above are unlikely, I'll grant you. But there's always the outside possibility that I might have typed something vaguely amusing. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

What??

It is, incidentally, entirely unacceptable that Blogger appears to have broken my template with no interference from me. Have they not noticed that I also have a blog at Wordpress? They haven't broken my template!

If I'd been messing around with the html coding then that would be fine - my own stupid fault, as it were. But I haven't and it ain't! Growl.

A Tale of H and S

It's funny - but not in the "ha-ha" sense of the word. When I'm at work I can usually keep going and going. It's only when I stop that things seems to seize up and it's happened again.

To use up the last of this year's holiday allowance I took Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off and I've struggled on all three days. I've been blah, I've been meh and I've been many other words ending in h as well. Especially sneezyh.

In between sneezing fits I've been enjoying my cable internet. Fat enough for me to comfortably stream video even while my significant otter is sett up working from "home". See what I did there?

As it's a cable connection, it comes with capability for a landline. This is something that I haven't had since I moved over here. I shelled out for a home telephone today and I'm hoping that it'll help to make up for the frankly crappy mobile phone signal I get here. Whether I'll be able to work out call transfers while I'm at the house is an open question.

It's also a question for tomorrow. I'm sleepy and a little shivery, and I'll like to snuggled up in bed now. I'd also like the s key on this laptop to start working properly again. Thanks very much.

Lesson Learned

I did something exceptionally stupid yesterday. I locked myself out.

It's not the end of the world, I know but even so. The least offensive word that sprang to mind was "gah". I had a wander around some of the local businesses to try to find a ladder, as the bedroom windows were open. Perhaps mercifully, no-one had one. I don't have the greatest head for heights and climbing from a ladder through a window might have posed a few gravity-related problems.

In the end, I bowed to the inevitable and called a locksmith. Thanks to the young fellow at the Foam Services office who had a Yellow Pages. Mind you, I think they call it "Golden Pages" over here!

Thanks also to the young guy from Maclock who was with me within half an hour and was very sympathetic and friendly, while totally professional and efficient. 30 seconds and I was back in the house. Luckily, I had the cash in my wallet to pay him.

Lesson learned, then. I didn't really want to have to pay €90 for that kind of lesson but I guess it could have been worse!

Define it...

This evening, I'd like to briefly illustrate the concept of irony for you.

I used to treat my previous house almost as a bedsit. I'd live in the bedroom and really only use the lounge for storing things in. Oh, and for ironing in. I digress.

My beautiful new home has a quirk all of its own in that the mobile signal from my provider is non-existant in most of the house. As my internet connection is via a 3G dongle this poses challenges.

The only place in the entire house that I can get a stable enough signal to be able to connect to the internet (until my fixed broadband is installed next week) is in the bedroom.

Irony. Thank you.

Packing

I've been making lists and organising things in my head but tomorrow I suppose I ought to start packing.

Have I mentioned that I'm moving?

It feels a little odd, to be honest. As strange as it may sound, this is the first place I've ever lived alone. Yes, I've had a pretty regular house guest but basically I live by myself. Moving from one place to another under these circumstances is a new experience for me.

I've built a lot of memories in this little house over the last three years. Practically all of the good ones involve being here with my Pretty Lady. In fact scratch the "practically" from that last sentence. I've also got some less good memories of the place, most of which involve coming home from work (or waking up) to find pools of rain from where the house wasn't entirely weatherproof. Oh, and not being able to keep the place warm in winter because of the stone floors. Anyway.

So I can move in next Tuesday. That's ideal in a lot of ways as it's payday - if there's anything I need to pick up for the house I'll have the moolah to do so. I'm very excited actually. It's a lovely quiet area. Down a very narrow lane (which will take a little negotiating with the car!) you come to two rows of terraced houses and mine is an end terrace. And the view from the top of the lane is wonderful...

 

Back within earshot of the bells!

Olympians

BBC Sport - Ennis, Rutherford and Farah light up London 2012 Olympics for Great Britain

"Great Britain claimed six gold medals and a silver on Day Eight of the London Games to enjoy their most successful day at an Olympics in 104 years."

I've lived through some days that'll be written in the history books. Today was one that'll go into the sporting history books.

The first Olympics I can remember was Munich '72. The terrific sporting achievements there are usually overshadowed in memory by the violent deaths of 17 people, but I'm slightly ashamed to say that my six-year old self was more interested in the games themselves. 

I remember Mark Spitz, Olga Korbut, but most all Mary Peters who won the hearts of the Bavarian crowd, a gold medal and brought a smile to the face of Belfast for a while.

The Olympic Games have held a special place in my heart ever since.

Foxed

It's far too late to be up typing this, as I have work tomorrow, but I'm extremely vexed and need to get it out of my system.

Basically, I'm annoyed with Firefox and the way it refuses to play with this extension I use to blog. Using the extension, Scribefire, in Chrome as I am now, I get asked to manually enter login and password details to publish to my backup blog at Wordpress. In Firefox, the same extension redirects me to Wordpress, I click on a button to authorise the extension and I get a message saying that I've entering a "bad login/pass combination".

Given the way that Firefox now takes a noticeably longer time to load pages, especially those with Flash content, this makes me think that I might be using Chrome for personal purposes for a while. I'm still obliged to use Firefox for work so I can keep an eye it.

This saddens me, to be honest. I've bought into Google wholesale for Calendar, e-mail etc but I like the idea of Open-Source software and I'd love it if Firefox was still the best, as it used to be. At the moment, it's not, though.

November Calls...

We lose people as life goes on. It's just the way that it is. We're never quite ready for the jolt, the feeling of sudden emptiness when a loved one passes away and we set about living with the hole in our life.

I say "loved one", really meaning someone close, like a close friend, family member or our significant other. Love casts a wider net than that, though. If we can assume that someone who has made a lasting impact on our lives, without whom we wouldn't be the same, is someone that we can love, then I mourn for a man that I loved.

Last Monday saw the passing of a man who has been widly hailed as one of the most talented musicians that ever graced our world. Jon Lord was a rare talent as a keyboard player and as a composer. Rock, blues and the world of contemporary classical music have lost a giant, whose like we are unlikely to see again. 

Possibly more importantly, everyone who had the pleasure to meet him agreed that he was intelligent, erudite and a gentleman. The world is a poorer place without him in it. My sincere condolences to his family and friends.

Duplication of Content

So I didn't delete the previous post. Sue me.

One thing about browsing the internet is that one tends to stumble upon horror stories about websites and tools that one uses regularly. For example, I read something this morning about Blogger randomly and accidentally deleting people's blogs. Gulp. I may not be here as much as I intend to be but the thought that Twirling might disappear is slightly unnerving.

With that in mind I signed up for a free Wordpress account and imported everything over to it. I plan to run it as a back-up for Twirling here, as I have a clever little blog posting tool that'll ask me if I want to post elsewhere when I click to publish.

I know that a lot of people swear by Wordpress but I'm not convinced. I'm aware that this is my OCD rising to the fore, but I can't get a template over there that'll indent the beginnings of paragraphs, unless I pay for it. Yes, it has some nice features but I want my paragraphs indented!

If any of you good people are Wordpress experts and have any tips, I'd be glad to hear them.

For the time being this site is still the primary one. I'll let you know if it changes.

Playing with Chrome

Pay no attention - I'm just playing with an blogging extension to Google's Chrome browser.

If you're lucky enough to see this post then either you've been very quick, in which case "well done", or you subscribe to my blog's feed, in which case "thank you"!

Paragraph.

Paragraphs have to be indented, of course!

Reichstag

Third of a Year

It's been a long time since I was here. I bet some of you had started wondering whether you'd ever see me re-appear. Oh ye of little faith.

February to June. Four months. More than four months now, actually. It's been a four months in which remarkable things have happened. I've been rained on and shined on. People I knew and loved have passed away, leaving the world a poorer place. I've had another birthday and am now older than I ever really expected to be.

I've seen places that I'd only ever heard about before. I no more expected to have stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and touched the remains of the Berlin Wall, than I had to have seen the bottom of Africa! Strange days indeed.

Although both Cape Town and Berlin are wonderful places to see, I had a weekend trip to a town that I didn't expect to see again so soon. Stepping off the train that day set my nerves a-jangling and I'm not sure that I could have done it at all, if not for the steadfast figure at my side. Despite the sad circumstances, it turned into a joy to see so many old friends again and to be able to introduce them to my Pretty Lady.

Who knows what the rest of 2012 might bring? Not I. It's like to be any other year you could name - laughter and tears, good things and bad. Hopefully the laughter and the good things will outnumber the tears and the bad.

Introspection

I need to know myself better.

Sometimes I get surges of sadness, melancholy, "growliness", call it what you will. I'm not always even aware of them and it takes someone else to point out the sudden change. I have no idea, sometimes, where these come from, from what twisted root they've sprung. All I know is that I don't want these things growing in my garden.

They unsettle me and, occasionally, those close to me. Tonight, I don't relish turning out the light.

The Day Of Rest

I compared a migraine to a hangover today. The more I think about it the better I think that the comparison is.

Imagine the worst hangover you ever had. Every light is too bright. Every sound is too loud. You're nauseous, dizzy and you hurt everywhere! Even resting your head on a pillow hurts so much you can't keep it in the same position for long. Oh, but did I mention that every move you make is a living hell?

That was my Sunday. And not the hangover option.

The Longest Month

Hmmm. I understand that the longest January on record lasted for 836 days. This one only seems to have gone for for about 600 so far, so it has a ways to go yet to hit the record books but it's a formidable attempt all the same.

I'm referring to the gap between paydays here, of course. It's damned decent of The Company That Pays Me to put my salary in my account a week early at Christmas but it does mean that instead of going from the 28th to the 28th, I find myself having to negotiate five weeks with only four weeks worth of moolah. And this with various festivities thrown in for good measure.

So I'm skinty-poo, as Billy Connolly once said. So much so that even my Humour Account is overdrawn and the first line of this is a piece of shameless plagiarism. Mind you, it was nicked from Twitter so fair game, eh? I never bought into Twitter. I didn't "get it", if you will. Therefore anything anything I steal from there counts as being picked up "somewhere on the internet" and as such isn't covered by any kind of copyright legislation.

Should I make it a Resolution to blog more often? The pull is starting up again (I know: I'll go blind!) so I may be here rather more often than I have been. especially late at night when I'm trying to fight off a craving for chocolate that I don't have. If the local corner shop were open 24 hours, I'm sure they'd do a roaring trade in chocolate and soft drinks. Probably in rolling papers too, considering I live in Student Central.

Or what about chocolate vending machines like bank ATMs? Incidentally, has anyone else ever noticed that the word "chocolate" is one of those that it's impossible to type correctly without serious concentration? There are several of those - ordinary, run-of the-mill words that just don't flow comfortably from a computer keyboard. "Thanks" is one for me. It always seems to come out as "thnaks" first time. Five letters but far from simple.

Where was I? Oh yes, January. Thnaks for reminding me. As the weekend falls where it does (crash!) I may well find funds available to me next Friday. Besides treating myself to something and paying bills, I shall try to squirrel a little extra away in hopes of getting some time away with my Pretty Lady later in the year. And, of course, there's the little matter of a Post-Peak Party to attend!

Merry Christmas

I had to look to see when I last posted something here. Was it really October? 

Since I was last here I've done things that I never dreamed I'd do. I mean, there was no way I was ever going to be throwing stones off the tip of Africa, right? Gazing out across the ocean, knowing the next landfall would be Antarctica. Crazy. Gazing out of the window of a plane at the lights of the Mediterranean below, crossing the Equator, these are all things that "other people" do.

Or going back to Edinburgh for the first time in probably 35 years. Wandering around the streets with my Lady and visiting the castle. Sitting in a 700-year old chapel and snuggling together against the wind. It's been a helluva year.

It's also the first Christmas Day for three years that I haven't been at work. That wasn't as bad as you might think. Working on Christmas Day draws everyone there together in the spirit of the day and produces a whole "last day of term" vibe. There are worse ways to spend one's Christmas Day.

I'm back to work tomorrow. Extended Christmas breaks are still definitely something that other people have. I couldn't over-indulge today even if I had the requisite in the house. That's okay too. I'll have to check later but I think I'm on late-cover tomorrow which means starting at 11 in the morning. There's even a Sunday bus service running so I don't have get up at stupid o'clock.

I decided to forgo the pleasure of a Christmas breakfast - I had planned on bacon sarnies but the bread was far too dry for that. No matter. The coffee was hot and sweet and it's got me through til now. It may be time to go and prepare that most traditional of Christmas Dinners - steak and wedges. You wouldn't grudge me a glass of wine with it, would you?

The Smart Thing

It's turned cold. Someone said today "Ahhh, summer's here at last!" But he was wrong. It wasn't raining. It was about half an hour later though, so I suppose that kind of negates my argument.

It seems silly to describe the night as dark. By definition, it's not the brightest period of a 24 hour. It's a very dark night tonight, though.

Thought I ought to check in before I curl up. Haven't been here for a while. Whatever strength and whatever words I've had have been going into work. I've had some kind of low-grade bug and, stupidly, had a 'Flu jab before I was properly over it.

This means the smartest thing is to snuggle up in the warm and get some sleep.

Gone.