quote of the day.

From my son, Angus:
'Dad, you and mum aren't friends, you're husband and wife!'

Old fartdom beckoning?

well, my hair hasn't fallen out overnight, nor my teeth. The Beige Gene - the one that makes you start thinking, 'actually, beige is nice' - hasn't kicked in. I haven't developed a predilection for jackets with leather patches or slippers in a plaid pattern, nor have I developed a yearning for a sports car, golf, or polo-necked sweaters in a diamond pattern. In fact, it's all pretty normal so far.
Happy 40th birthday, me.

marinading.

Home remedies can be a wonderful thing, inasmuch as they show the triumph of hope over cruel reality. For example, my wife has been applying a mixture of almond oil, olive oil, garlic and onions to my head for the past few weeks, because, apparently, it will strengthen my hair, make it more lustrous, and aid new hair growth. I have gone along with this, even though I'm sceptical. I'm being made even more sceptical by the fact that my head smells like a garlicky marinade, and has done for several days despite regular washing. And why all this? well, it's because I'm losing my hair by degrees, and my wife wants to help me keep as much of it as possible, as long as possible, and as coloured as possible, even if it means having to smell like something you'd smear over a leg of lamb and leave in the fridge overnight. It doesn't matter if I go on about telomeres, genetic inheritance, the loss of melanin, the gradually increasing friability of hair once the cell begins to die - 'try this, it'll help'. And because I'm a bit on the vain side, I go along with it, even though I know that it won't work. I don't think I'm alone in this. Having to face up to the, er, bare fact of the balding process is one of those things most men have to go through - the knowledge that one's youth is passing and gone, stupid evanescent thing. Yet still we try to avoid it for as long as possible. It's not that my hair loss is that bad: compared to my dad and grandfather, I actually still have hair, and it's mostly the original colour: No, it's the fact that it is ongoing.
The situation bears a similarity with the inevitable fact of death, the occurence of one's own, that is. The only consolation of my demise will be that I won't smell of onions. Hopefully.

A few more pics

These are from 1987 (21 years ago! How is that possible? there are people at my uni now on the verge of graduating who weren't even born when I first started boozing it up there), taken in the Mandela Bar and outside one of the entrances to the Main building. the former are of Michelle Shocked, a folk and protest singer of the time, and still among the very best gigs I have ever been to, and the latter of a very bored John Webb picketing the massed hordes of students trying to get to a 9.30 lecture. These pictures are all very typical of their time.

back in the saddle

I finally got back in the saddle today, after seven weeks. My arm's now feeling a bit sore for it, but it was good to ride again, even when I had a sudden wobble and thought I was about to go over again. I took it easy, riding by the river to work and giving myself half an hour for what would normally be a 15-20 minute journey across town. Whether I'll do it again tomorrow remains to be seen.
The feeling of mellowness engendered by the gentle release of endorphins into my bloodstream due to exercise was then completely buggered over by the discovery that my external HDD had been nuked my the computer in the classroom. I arrived home, plugged it in, and found it wouldn't work - 'the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable'. This is a bit of a bugger, as I haven't got a backup of it. Cue grinding of teeth, attempted hacking, a brief interlude to smack my head against a wall, then downloading of a file recovery program, which is now running oh-so-slowly on the main tower. I just hope I can save my info.
Nevertheless, even if it is lost, I'll be able to recover the majority of it from here and there, I think, and build it slowly back up again, datum by datum. After all, it's just another way of getting back in one's saddle, of taking control again, getting back in the (not always) right direction.

Nothing.

A somewhat hectic day halfway done....I've had to cover someone's group this morning, and now I've got four solid hours' of teaching to go. Whoopy-do. I'm also not really in a mood to scrawl anything, but feel I should make a more concerted effort than I have been doing recently. Anyway, I have three minutes before the start of my lesson, so I thought I'd take a leaf out of mys sister's blog and write frantically and not necessarily accurately over the space of a couple of minutes.
So, er, what should I write? well, there's the usual domestic stuff and, in exciting news, I put up a load of shelves yesterday. My arm continues its progress back to health, although I still can't bend it completely and the bicep looks distinctly wimpy compared to my other arm. Right, that's three minutes and nothing written - bye!