Tag: nostalgia

#oneaday Day 611: That Happened: “…Oil and Poo”

When struggling for things to talk about, or indeed write about, any creative shortcoming can usually be quickly rectified by a nostalgic trip into something which happened in the near (or distant) past. Some people base their entire blogs on this, and, of course, the lucrative autobiography industry uses this approach as a fundamental basis for a bajillion books all called “Celebrity Name: My Story”.

So I thought I’d start an occasional series based on bizarre incidents which have occurred throughout the course of my life that probably aren’t that bizarre in reality, but certainly amuse me if no-one else. These will not be presented in anything even remotely approaching chronological order — they will simply turn up as I think of them and when I feel like it. Much like the inspiration for the vast majority of other entries in this increasingly-lengthy blog, in fact (for which I salute you if you’ve been reading since the beginning).

Preamble over, I shall begin. Are you sitting comfortably? Here we go.

At university (the University of Southampton, UK, to be precise, if you’re picky about that sort of detail) I was a member of the university theatre group, which underwent a number of name changes during my time with them. Initially it was the “Blow Up Theatre Group” (I, to this day, don’t know why), then simply “Theatre Group” and later “Rattlesnake! Theatre Group” (the reasoning for which I now, sadly, can’t remember).

The point of this story is not the name of the theatre group, however, but rather the shenanigans which I and the other participants got up to.

At one point late in my university career, I got together with a friend with whom I was a member of the group and we decided that we were going to put on a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As was fashionable at the time, we decided to set it in the 1920s era. (I say “fashionable” — my sole basis for this assumption is that my secondary school also set its production of Twelfth Night, in which I played the role of Malvolio, in the 1920s) We were all set to begin rehearsals when my friend and co-director decided that now would be a really good time to go on a lengthy skiing trip. (She came from a family with money and was somewhat prone to flights of fancy.)

I wasn’t sure what was going on until I got a gushing, apologetic email from her announcing that she didn’t feel she could be responsible for the show and decided to leave me in the sole role as director. I, of course, had never directed a show before and had not a fucking clue how to lead a ragtag group of wannabe actors into producing a show. Fortunately, the remainder of the crew rallied behind me and helped out, and I was enormously grateful for their assistance — even if the stress of carrying out the project gave me both a spectacularly tramp-like beard and more than a few nosebleeds, somehow and inexplicably earning me the nickname “Beast Man” in the process.

The show went well. It ended up being somewhat farcical in its execution, but this, in fact, worked in its favour and helped make the typically obtuse Shakespearean humour somewhat more digestible to a modern audience. We were all pretty pleased with how the whole thing turned out, but by far the most memorable thing about the whole fiasco was the aftershow party.

I can’t even remember whose house the aftershow party was at, just that it was quite an event. Several key events from that evening stick in my mind, however, starting with a member of the cast sitting in a wicker chair that he thought looked rather comfortable and then discovering that it was not, in fact, as pleasing to sit on as it looked. Said chair was consequently dubbed “The Chair of Eternal Disappointment” and became a focal point for the evening, helped in part by the amount of drink and weed which was in circulation throughout the course of the celebrations.

At some point after midnight, a small splinter group of partygoers decided that it was time to leave our generous hosts’ house behind and go and seek adventure elsewhere. Thus followed one of those journeys across town which meandered so much you ended up completely lost, but somewhere cool.

In our case, we found ourselves on the banks of the river Itchen (I think) on a makeshift beach covered in gravel and some unpleasantly dirty-looking seaweed. There, we indulged in what all good luvvies should do at approximately 4am in the morning — improvisatory theatre. We laughed and giggled until the sun started to peek its head over the horizon, at which point things took something of a turn for the bizarre.

One of our number, who already had a particularly loud, bellowing voice, was somewhat intoxicated through a cocktail of various chemical substances coursing through the pleasure centres of his brain, and thus became even louder than usual. As such, we were unsurprised when he proudly announced that he was going to go for a wee in the river. He took off his shoes and socks and paddled into the water, then happily stood in profile to us, got his (clearly visible) cock out and started to piss into the Itchen. (It’s nothing worse than the filthy river was usually full of.)

Following this display, which he was not at all abashed about, he decided that now would be a really good time to see what the dirty seaweed on the beach tasted like. Stomachs in throat, we watched him pick up a piece of the filthy, slimy crap from the floor and gleefully stuff it into his mouth.

What followed was the kind of facial expression you get from anyone who puts something they find distasteful into their mouth but doesn’t quite want to spit it out. He chewed on it for an alarmingly long period of time before letting the mangled remains of the goopy crap spill forth from his mouth.

“Ugh,” he cried. “It tastes like oil and poo!”

Despite the hilarity that statement caused, the fact that one of our number was reduced to eating seaweed tipped the rest of us off to the fact that it was probably time to head homewards. Of course, we had no fucking idea where we were, so again followed a meandering course through the back streets of the city until we eventually found ourselves on familiar territory and, bizarrely, craving Jaffa Cakes.

Unfortunately, the era of 24 hour shopping had not made a big impact on Southampton by this point, and so we found ourselves stranded outside a closed and shuttered newsagents’ store begging to whatever gods we did (or didn’t) believe in for them to let us in for Jaffa Cakes.

Unsurprisingly, the gods in question did not yield and the shutters remained firmly closed. This, it seemed, was the final straw — it was time, once and for all, to go home. We all went our separate ways — walking, naturally, using that bizarre amount of stamina that total intoxication gives you — and found ourselves back in our own houses, safe and sound, ready for bed just as the rest of the world was waking up.

The following day was, naturally, a complete writeoff. But I’m almost certain that if I spoke to anyone else who was there that night, they’d remember the events as clearly as I do. It was, to paraphrase one Mr Stinson, legendary.

#oneaday Day 559: You Can’t Go Back

What’s done is done. However much you might want to turn back time and do things again, the oft-requested Quicksave feature for Life has never made an appearance in several million years of patches, so I’m pretty much sure that we’re stuck with our broken save system with permadeath.

In seriousness, though, a bit of nostalgia-tripping through some old podcasts that some friends and I used to make (long before the Squadron of Shame got all podcasty) reminds me that time has indeed passed — and quite a bit of it. Certain people are no longer in my life. Certain people have shifted to the peripheries of my life. Many of the things I used to do are distant memories. And, of course, I’m no longer 26 years old, as my girlfriend Andie is so keen to point out. (She’s going to be on the receiving end of plenty of revenge when she turns 30. Oh yes indeed.)

This sense of change is made all the more prominent in the digital age, given that it’s entirely possible to leave a trail of digital detritus across the entire Internet. Some of it gets lost, but some of it remains here and there as evidence of things that are constant and things that aren’t.

The aforementioned Gaming with Pedwood podcast MySpace page, for example, is still there, as is, for that matter, my page. (Buggered if I can remember the login details for either of them, though.)

A short-lived attempt at blogging the life of a teacher is also still present and correct, a follow-up to a series of emails I sent during my PGCE. I thought I wrote more than that, but as you can see, it tails off pretty quickly as I discovered that the life of a teacher, particularly in a dodgy chav-infested rathole that was £500k in the red was, in fact, rather stressful, and I thought it would be perhaps unwise to chronicle all that in a totally honest manner at the time.

And my 1up.com page is still up and running, featuring possibly some of my earliest attempts at games-related blogging.

Sadly, a couple of sites are nowhere to be seen. You can get at the Angry Jedi site as far back as 2003 via the Wayback Machine but sadly some of the links and pictures are broken, meaning that some of the MP3 files we created are gone forever. The site I put together for the University of Southampton Theatre Group can also be found via the Wayback Machine — including the very early example of blogging that I did using a Palm Tungsten, a 32MB SD card, a card reader and an Internet café. High tech!

The site that I’m pretty sure I had at petedavison.com — my first experience with WordPress, no less — is nowhere to be seen, unfortunately. And the site I constructed at university, known as Studio A33 (after my first year flat) which distributed the various dodgy Klik and Play games my friends and I created, is also conspicuously absent. This is a great shame, as I had a tremendous urge to play Hobbit Blasters recently. I’m sure it’s lurking on a CD somewhere in the garage.

Life moves on at a rate far too rapid for our liking sometimes. It’s pleasing to come across such fragments of our digital lives from time to time, as it reminds us of where we’ve come from, both good and bad places. But we can’t go back — however hard you might want to try and recapture the feelings you describe in these digital fragments, you need to accept that it ain’t ever going to happen.

#oneaday Day 514: Looking Back

It’s ironic, really, that one of the best things about living in The Future is the ability to recapture the past at will. While we may not have managed to nail the whole time travel thing just yet, despite our speculative fiction authors coming up with a number of potential solutions, technology provides the next best thing, which is to revive things from our past in our present.

There’s lots of ways this happens. We have the pixel art movement, creating art from the graphics of 20 years ago. We have sites like Good Old Games celebrating, well, the good old games of the world. We have YouTube and its magical, ever-expanding collection of tat from your childhood which someone has lovingly gone to the effort of finding, digitising and putting on the Internet for all and sundry. (On a side note, the word “digitised” doesn’t seem to be used much these days. I remember it used to be a word to denote excitement in the late 80s and early 90s — “this game has digitised speech!” “WOW!” etc.)

Is this healthy, though? Wikipedia (I know, I know, I don’t have an actual dictionary to hand) describes nostalgia as “a yearning for the past, often in an idealised form”. The rose-tinted spectacles syndrome. Nostalgia sees you thinking back to past experiences and thinking “God, that was awesome” with an implied “but I’m not sure I’d want to go back and do it again.” If you can actually go back and do those things that inspired such nostalgia, does it lose its impact?

It varies. Sometimes old things really don’t hold up well to close scrutiny. And sometimes they do. In the video game world, Ultima Underworld holds up a whole lot better than, say, anything on the Atari 8-bit computer. Granted, there’s more than a few years between them, but they’re both things that evoke a feeling of nostalgia in people who knew them first time around — and they’re both things that you can recapture the feeling of, either through an emulator in the case of the Atari computers (or indeed finding a working model on eBay) or in the cast of Ultima Underworld, through Good Old Games, which has very graciously recently made both games available once again after a very long time.

The same is true of non-gaming experiences, of course. Things that you thought were delicious and tasty in your youth might taste like crap now because your palate is more refined. Having a farting competition on the school field might not hold the same appeal. Doodling cocks on exercise books might cease to be amusing. (Though I doubt it. If I ever get to that stage, kindly kill me.)

A lot of it is due to your own attitude towards the past, of course. If you’re an inherently nostalgic person, then you’ll be predisposed to enjoy rediscovering old things, whether this is an old video game, a diary you wrote when you were twelve or a CD you used to listen to on repeat over and over and over. But some people prefer to move on, always pushing forward, leaving the past behind, preferring to let bygones be bygones. They get to enjoy the latest, the greatest, the biggest, the best. But they never get to do the things that once made them happy again. That’s kinda sad.

You can probably guess which category I fall into. If you’re having trouble, the fact that I replaced my Windows “busy” cursors with the pixelated monochrome bee cursor from the Atari ST today should make it abundantly clear.

#oneaday Day 136: Childlike Wonderment

Everyone supposedly misses their childhood, a time of innocence and purity when you could make fart jokes without worrying about your potential audience. And sure, there are plenty of awesome things about childhood — and plenty of reasons to ensure you keep an air of immaturity handy should the occasion demand it. But there were plenty of shitty things, too. So, in the best tradition of online journalism, I present to you the Top Five Reasons Childhood was Shit/Awesome.

Shit: Enforced Sport

P.E. lessons were something of a necessary evil, but inflicting team sports on non-sporty types is just torture, particularly when said non-sporty types inevitably are the last ones to get picked for the team, leading to abject humiliation, even if it was unintentional. So fuck P.E. — I’d much rather we’d had sessions in the gym or something. Of course, our school didn’t have  a gym at that point, so…

Awesome: Imaginary Play with Shit Props

My primary school was out in the country, so naturally this meant we had a lot of countryside things find their way into the playground. We had The Log, which was fairly self-explanatory, and found itself carved into an interesting assault course by everyone who discovered you could scrape a stick along it and make “piggy dust”. But we also had two tractor tyres, which could be stacked in various ways to make “flight simulators” of varying complexity. Which was awesome.

Shit: Inadvertent Bodily Functions

At school, you are statistically more likely to throw up in front of people, shit yourself or piss yourself than at any other time in your life, until you become an old person, when said risk starts to increase again. I think that’s really all that needs to be said on the matter. Pissing, shitting or sicking yourself is never pleasant — and even worse if there are witnesses. If you piss, shit or sick yourself when you’re older than a child, people assume there’s something wrong and that you need help. If you piss, shit or sick yourself when you’re a child, though, you’ll become an object of ridicule and never recover. Even years later, you’ll be Captain “Hey! Remember that time you shat yourself?”.

Awesome: The Acceptability of Lunchtime Farting Contests

Depending on your place of work, this may not apply, but for the most part, competing with your peers for who can do the best fart (and, by extension, who can discover the best position into which you can manoeuvre your legs and anus to create the most cacophonic flatulence possible) is unacceptable. But at school, this sort of behaviour was perfectly normal, if normally confined to the far end of the school field.

Shit: Having to Swear in Stealth

Swearing too much is the sole preserve of the chav, but everyone knows that a well-executed expletive can be enormously entertaining. At school, swearing was enough to get you a detention (though in my experience, these days kids swear so much it’s generally ignored by teachers) and at home it was enough to get you a good hiding/grounding. Now, as grown adults, you can call each other cocks with gay abandon.

Awesome: Sleepovers

You can have sleepovers when you’re older, but your friends tend to have their own house, and sleeping in their bedroom is generally frowned upon. But back in childhood and even into teenagerdom, sleepovers were a big deal. My favourite sleepover came after one of our exam results days, when my friend Woody “invented” the phenomenon of Emperor Farts, which simply involves quoting one of the Emperor’s lines from Star Wars, then farting. It’s funnier if you see it actually happening.

Shit: Subculture Segregation

Okay, this still happens when you’re older, but it’s particularly pronounced in school. Geeks don’t talk to the cool kids. Cool kids don’t talk to musicians, who are a different kind of cool, unless they’re in the orchestra, in which case they’re kind of a geek. Goths don’t talk to anyone. Chavs talk to everyone but usually to start a fight. And everyone stays in their own little clique. Grow up a bit and you’ll find yourself blending with a much more diverse band of people, particularly if you work somewhere like an Apple Store.

Awesome: Kids’ TV

Kids’ TV in the 80s and 90s was, as the rose-tinted spectacles will have it, awesome. A lot of it, to its credit, is still funny today, and entertaining for kids and adults alike. Contrast with the bullshit on kids’ TV today… and you end up sounding like an old man. But hey.

Shit: Constraints

As a kid, you had to be home by a certain time, eating at a certain time, in bed by a certain time. As a grownup you can generally do what the fuck you please, so long as you either haven’t made dinner plans with a hot date, or don’t mind pissing off your hot date.

Awesome: Simple Pleasures

As a kid, you can find entertainment and enjoyment in the simplest things. Parents get a new car? Get taken out for a ride in it! Found a box of old clothes? Play dress-up! Got some Lego? Make something awesome without the first thing that enters your mind being a three-dimensional blocky phallus! The possibilities are endless, and you don’t even need money for most things.

So basically, being a kid was pretty awesome and shit at the same time, just like being an adult. The key, then, is to find a way to balance out the awesome and shit parts of both.

So, who’s up for a lunchtime farting competition?

#oneaday, Day 38: Angry Jedi

In an attempt to stem the tide of people asking one of the most common questions on the Internet—”how did you get your username?”—I shall set out the story forthwith.

I’m a trained teacher, as some of you may know. This meant I spent an extra year at university following my practically useless but enjoyable English and Music degree studying a PGCE (a PostGraduate Certificate of Education, for those who like to know what their acronyms mean). It was an enjoyable but stressful time, and I was happy to make some good friends during that time, one of whom was my placement buddy for my second in-school assignment.

His name was Owen, and he was a good man that I’ve sadly fallen out of touch with in recent years, but we had some excellent times. He was also convinced that we were Jay and Silent Bob, an observation that was pretty accurate on so many levels. But that’s beside the point: the point is, Owen and I were the original source of Angry Jedi.

You see, sometimes when you get home from teaching practice all you really want to do is get absolutely trashed on cheap rosé and make music from approximately 48 CDs worth of samples. So that’s what we regularly did, with extremely entertaining results. We decided that we needed a name for our makeshift band, and decided that the oxymoron “Angry Jedi” was a fitting summation of our respective personalities and the bizarre music we created. Ever since that time, I’ve taken to using “Angry Jedi” or some variant thereof as my username, as it’s 1) a reminder of some very fond memories and 2) a name that no-one else ever appears to have thought of on the Internet… except someone on Xbox LIVE.

On Xbox LIVE, I’m called “sonicfunkstars”, which I believe we discussed the other day. “sonicfunkstars” (all lower case, that’s important) was a previous makeshift band that consisted of me and, occasionally, my good friends Sam and Edd. There was also a brief dalliance with being “Captain Gaspard and the Snarfriders”, but tracks under that name are all on a MiniDisc somewhere (yes! MiniDisc!) and I have no idea where. If I ever find them, you’ll be the first to know.

But you don’t care about personal history. You want to hear the ridiculous sounds we came out with, of course. All right. Here’s a selection of some of our finest moments. iPhone users, as ever, click on the song titles to listen. Everyone else, use the fancypants WordPress flash player thingy.

Bad Influence

This track was composed for two reasons: firstly, to have an excuse to use as many Harry Potter quotes as possible, including the titular “Bad Influence” extract. Secondly, we put it together while we were teaching a unit on “fusion” music at school. As such, there are some fairly diverse ethnic influences throughout the track. It also contains the line “It’s knowledge. It’s power. It’s not a fucking tractor.” And, as I recall, we used to find the “ta ta tippy tippy tum na” guy hilarious, though that may have had something to do with the amount of wine consumed.

Baching Mad

When creating this track, we decided it would be amusing to imagine what it would be like if J.S. Bach were having a piano lesson and doing very badly—so badly, in fact, that he ended up breaking his piano. (Let’s leave aside the historical inaccuracy of J.S. Bach playing a piano for a moment.) We then followed this by attempting to mix together as many inappropriate pieces of “classical” music as possible with some kickin’ beats. See how many you can spot. This is, to date, one of my favourite aural monstrosities. Particularly the key change partway through.

Kick the Dog

I honestly can’t remember what twisted path of logic led to the decision that we should create a track based on abusing small yapper-type dogs with a variety of increasingly-gruesome implements punctuated by drum fills performed by chickens. But I’m glad we followed it. Owen’s performance of all the verbs he wanted to do to annoying rat-like dogs took several takes, as I recall. There’s also a nice bit of Nirvana mixed in there, too. No actual dogs were harmed during the course of this track.

The Guff Rap

No explanation required.

Get Off My Ship Original Mix and Ultimate Mix

These two tracks performed two important functions: firstly, to provide a showcase for PATRICK STEWART, and secondly, to demonstrate the concept of remixing to impressionable sixth formers. Captain Picard gets increasingly frustrated at the people who keep invading his bridge and politely requests they vacate the premises.

The Judas Joint

Our crowning glory: mixing, if I recall correctly, five Judas Priest tracks together and including a break for Meg Ryan to have an orgasm. The evil laugh in this is performed by me. I was pretty impressed with myself.

There are other tracks, some of which don’t appear to have survived the move between computers and through time. The most notable absence is a brilliant song called “Today Fucking Sucked”, which I don’t believe needs any further explanation.

Anyhow. I hope you’ve enjoyed this window into the life of a trainee teacher, circa 2002-2003. And now you know why I’m called Angry Jedi. It is not because of the somewhat more offensive meaning of the phrase which my friend Amy discovered last year.

If you want to know that one, you can Google it yourself. (It’s quite amusing. And/or disgusting. I forget which.)

#oneaday, Day 36: School Bands

The delectable and sexy Mr Alex Cronk-Young came out with this little nugget on Twitter earlier:

(in other news, great job on that Twitter integration, WordPress. Love it. But I digress.)

Ahem. Anyway. Following that statement, I decided it would be a good idea to go back and investigate if the music I listened to back at school actually was shit. Well, actually, I know for a fact that some of it was shit, even back then, but I’m interested to see how it compares to the shit we have today, if you see what I mean.

I’ve carefully selected ten tracks for your delectation. Those of you who have Spotify can clicky-click the titles to hear them if you’ve never heard them or can’t remember what they sound like.

So here goes! Let’s jump in.

Oasis: Rocking Chair

Oasis were huge while I was at school. It was the height of the “Oasis vs Blur” nonsense, which I never quite understood because they were two completely different bands with very different sounds from one another.

Within the Oasis fans, though, there were a few subsets; the people who just bought the albums and listened to their stuff on the radio, and those who thought they were “hardcore” because they’d bought all the singles and thus had access to all the B-sides.

The thing is, though, most of Oasis’ B-sides and album tracks were considerably better than the singles they put out. For starters, they didn’t always stick to the standard “guitar, bass, drums, vocals” combo that most of their singles did. This track, for instance, includes a bit of subtle organ work (easy there) in the background and as such has a very different sound from a lot of their other work.

Most of the B-sides were just plain better tunes, too. Rocking Chair perhaps wasn’t the best of them, but it’s certainly one that I’m fond of, and less well-known than the now overly-played The Masterplan.

Alanis Morissette: You Oughta Know

Jagged Little Pill was the second ever album I bought. I’m not entirely sure why I bought it, because Alanis Morissette was on local radio on the school bus pretty much every single day and I wasn’t entirely sure that I liked her voice.

I was pleasantly surprised by the album, though. There was a lot of very obvious angst throughout, particularly in this track. She swore, too, which made it A Bit Rebellious.

Now obviously I wasn’t an angry young Canadian woman in my teens, so I perhaps couldn’t relate to this album on a particularly personal level. But she wrote some decent tunes and had a distinctive sound of her own. More to the point, these songs still hold up pretty well today.

The Verve: Lucky Man

The Verve were one of those groups that I picked up the album for after much deliberation. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the singles I’d heard on the radio were quite what I was looking for, and once I’d picked up the album I still wasn’t convinced that they were actually any good.

This track stuck out, though. It may have been due to my friend Craig’s incessant insistence that we try and learn how to play it in the school’s music practice rooms every lunchtime—that and most of Oasis’ B-sides, some of which we actually did a respectable job of—but, besides the over-over-overplayed Bitter Sweet Symphony (which still gets rolled out on TV promos today) this was one that seemed to be tuneful and memorable.

Listening to it now, it’s a bit dull and morose, but it is better than the rest of the album.

Spice Girls: 2 Become 1

Too many guitars! Need more crap and cheese! (That sounds like the worst party ever.)

The Spice Girls were overproduced rubbish who couldn’t sing live. They were supposedly “hot”, but I found their aesthetic appeal somewhat questionable. Victoria Adams (now Beckham, of course) was too skinny and moody-looking. Emma Bunton looked a bit… I don’t know, odd. It was unfashionable to find Mel C attractive and she had pikey trousers (but would go on to be by far the best solo artist) and Mel B was just too frightening and weird to find in any way hot.

That left Geri, of course, who was ginger at the time, and thus made anyone judging her to be the “hottest” feel a little conflicted thanks to the age-old ginger stigma—something else I never quite understood.

Also, this song made us giggle at the time when we all determined that it was about fucking. It’s really not subtle. At all.

The Cardigans: Sick & Tired

I actually didn’t own a Cardigans album until much, much later, but this track was on a dodgy compilation CD called “Essential Indie” (the rest of which was utter shit, as I recall) which I got free with my Discman. I remember thinking that I liked the combination of Nina Persson’s sweet, girly voice and the unusual inclusion of flute and bassoon in the backing instruments.

Turns out I still do like all those things. What do you know.

Bernard Butler: Not Alone

Bernard Butler’s People Move On is another album that I don’t remember why I bought. I also remember thinking that the vast majority of it was dirge-like, boring crap. This track, though, had energy and “power” behind it, and I enjoyed listening to it, even if the rest of the album was dirge-like boring crap.

Still sounds all right today. I like the strings. I’m a big fan of string parts in guitar bands generally.

James: Laid

Ah, actually, I think this one was also on “Essential Indie”. It’s also another song about fucking.

I was a bit torn on whether I liked James or not; “Sit Down” was one of those tracks that was played so often on the radio and TV that you felt a bit dirty liking anything that was associated with it. But this was a decent enough song, even though it doesn’t really go anywhere and has way too much falsetto.

No, actually, it’s not that great at all. Fuck James.

Britney Spears: I Will Be There

Time for more cheesy crap! Britney hit the bigtime while we were still at school and I found myself liking her cheesy bullshit despite myself—even without taking that video (which, for the record, no-one was quite sure if they were supposed to find sexy or pervy) into account.

I’ve chosen this track to prove that I have indeed listened to her whole album. I also quite liked the fact that Metropolis Street Racer spoofed this particular song quite nicely on its excellent, completely original soundtrack.

Mansun: Stripper Vicar

Mansun were weird. Their album Attack of the Grey Lantern appeared to contain some sort of rudimentary conceptual storyline, until the bonus track told everyone otherwise.

This track pretty much summed it up. A song about a vicar who wears plastic trousers and gets away with stripping, who then dies.

It’s still pretty bewildering to listen to today, to be honest. Decent album, though—worth a listen.

Radiohead: Exit Music (For A Film)

This is the most depressing piece of music of all time, without question. It’s not as if OK Computer was a particularly uplifting album at the best of times, but for this track to show its miserable, suicidal face just four songs into the disc pretty much made it clear that if you were going to listen to this album all the way through, you were in for a Rough Ride.

It’s still a profoundly affecting track today, full of whiny miserable emotion and dodgy vocal synthesis in the backing. It’s difficult to know what is the “right mood” to listen to this track, because if you listen to it while feeling miserable, it sure isn’t going to help. But this song could bring a candy convention in Happyland to its knees, too.

Basically, it’s a great song but no-one should listen to it if they want to smile ever again.

There you go. A super-uplifting playlist for your Saturday night, circa 1999. Enjoy.

#oneaday, Day 31: Looking Back Through a Lens

I love photos. In one of my many houses at university, I had a whole corridor whose walls were papered with photographs I’d taken throughout the course of the previous year. It may well have looked a bit serial killer-ish, but I liked it (until I took them all down shortly before moving out and discovered the wall behind was actually damp and mouldy—thanks a lot, scumbag landlord) and it provided a nice visual record of what had gone on.

This was in the days before digital cameras were particularly widespread, of course, so these were actual photos on actual paper. I took a lot of photos, but there was still no way it’d be possible to take as many as you can with today’s cameras. That meant that each captured memory had to be just so, and there was no going back to try again; you caught it, or you missed it. Simple as that.

Of course, nowadays, it’s much easier to capture and keep a memory, assuming you don’t do something ridiculous to your computer like take it into the bath with you. But that doesn’t mean photos lose any of their impact, or the memories contained therein. I’ll bet I can take a random selection of photos from my iPhoto library and be able to explain each and every one of them.

In fact, let’s do just that. I’ll give you ten, just so we’re not here all night. Hold on, I’ll be right back.

So without further ado, here we go.

Would you look at that? We went and got a nice one to begin with. This is the wedding day (obviously) of my friends Rob and Rachel. Instead of confetti, they had bubbles. It was awesome, and we all ate a lot of food and got quite drunk. Fact: Rob and Rachel were one of the first couples I knew who got together at university and are still going strong today. I salute you, you lovely pair.

Aha. There are actually two separate stories behind this one. The guy in white makeup is, I believe, a chap called James Gaynor, who was starring alongside me in a production of Marivaux’s L’Epreuve, also known as A Test of Character. He was playing a character called Frontin, I was playing a character called Lucidor. Lucidor was in love with a girl called Angelique, who was played by a most lovely lady named Sarah, but there was a long and complicated plot involving Frontin pretending to court her on Lucidor’s behalf and it all got a bit French.

As for the mobile phone and the text on it: the mobile phone was mine at the time (Nokia REPRESENT), “sonicfunkstars” was the name of the fake band I made music under (using Sony’s ACID Music software and approximately 24 CDs of samples, most of which I probably never used) and “txtr’s thumb” was the name of my second album. Interestingly (not really), “sonicfunkstars” is still my Xbox LIVE ID, and it’s one of the only places on the Internet where I’m not “angryjedi” or some variant thereof. The other is YouTube.

(Exclusive: I found the title track from said album. It used to irritate the fuck out of anyone with a Nokia phone. You’ll see why.)

Ah yes. I can tell you exactly what is going on here. This is during my second year at university. The location is my friend Chris’ bedroom. Under the desk is Sam, who is drunk, and spent most of the night seeing what tiny spaces he could contort himself into.

Lying on the floor is Steph, who is reading a book—possibly Bridget Jones’ Diary. In the background is her erstwhile boyfriend Brett, my most enduring memory of whom is when he burst in the front door of Steph’s house, furious that “someone’s drawn knobs all over my car”. Someone had indeed drawn knobs in the snow that was all over his car, and Sam and I naturally knew absolutely nothing about it.

But that was not the occasion in this photo. No. This was simply a social gathering at Chris’ house—Sam, Steph and I were all flatmates in the first year, so we often took the opportunity to hang out together. We’d “lost” a couple of flatmates along the way to other social groups, but we’d stuck together for a lot of the time.

One of whom was the rather magnificent Beki, seen pictured here with Sam, again. This photo was taken on our hall of residence bar’s “70s Night”, a night where only the six of us from Flat A33, Hartley Grove Halls, Southampton, made the effort to dress up. Sam is wearing a woman’s shirt.

Whizz forward to last year, and we have a picture of a game of Scotland Yard in progress, one of the very few games I’m aware of that provide you with a hat as part of its components. Pictured is Tom. Not pictured is Sam. And me. Obviously.

This Post-It space invader adorned the front wall of Ruffian Games’ studios in Dundee. Obviously a little light relief after getting Crackdown 2 out the door.

Back in time to the first year at university again, we see here the midst of Operation Shopping Trolley, our attempts to stealthily remove the shopping trolley that had inexplicably appeared in our flat overnight. “Inexplicably” as in for once it wasn’t one of us who had brought it up. Notice the cunning ninja disguises Sam and I have adopted.

This is Dungeonquest, one of either the best or worst games ever created depending on your outlook. It’s a game where you have an approximately 23% chance of survival (they tell you this in the instruction booklet), and is almost completely determined by blind luck. Combat is resolved almost literally by rock-paper-scissors… except here it’s slash-mighty blow-leap aside. I was astonished to discover that they have actually remade this monstrosity. I was also quite tempted to pick up a copy, but that would be a very silly idea.

To this date, this is still the most literary piece of graffiti I’ve ever seen, found on the back of the cubicle door in the gents’ toilets in The Hobbit pub, Southampton. The whole door was something to behold; there were full-on conversations and slagging matches going on between various wall-writers, an excerpt of which you can see here. Theatre Studies was repeatedly accused of gayness. A bit rich coming from people hanging out in gents’ toilets.

And why don’t we end with this one, then? This offensive masterpiece was produced by the cast of Southampton “Rattlesnake!” Theatre Group’s production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round The Garden whilst finishing off rehearsals prior to taking the show to the Edinburgh Fringe. We’d all gone a little bit stir crazy by then, and so we took to lite-vandalising the whiteboards in the lecture theatre where we’d been rehearsing. (“Lite” because you could just rub it off. But we did leave it there for the lecturer to discover in the morning.)

Look closely and you’ll see a selection of details; Pac-Man re-imagined to become Sonic the Hedgehog eating shit, some stickpeople having a threesome, some anagrams, a victim’s eye view of the Ku Klux Klan looking down on someone they’ve just thrown down a well, an out-of-context stage direction from the play made to sound dirty just by the simple addition of “just the way I like it” and my excellent drawing of the entire cast of the show, except me, because while I was quite happy to draw all the others I didn’t feel confident drawing myself. Also, BUTTOCKS.

There you go. Proof that I have an incredible memory for silly crap. And proof that even if you’ve forgotten me, I probably haven’t forgotten you.

#oneaday, Day 290: Ever Onward

Something that someone told me recently (yay for specifics) has stuck with me. That something was the phrase “you don’t stop knowing someone when you’re not with them any more”. Those perhaps weren’t the exact words, but the sentiment stands. And it’s true, whatever the context of you not being with that person any more is. It doesn’t have to be a romantic thing. It could simply be a friendship thing.

I have two examples in mind here. Just recently, I had the good fortune to be reunited with a buddy from school with whom I’d kept in idle contact with—the occasional Facebook comment or tweet—but hadn’t seen face-to-face since the time he visited me during my first year of university, got roaringly drunk with me and then proceeded to assist me in the consumption of a pound of Tesco Value mild cheddar cheese at about 3 in the morning. Actually, there was an incident subsequent to that which involved several people vomiting out of the window of a house onto the corrugated plastic roof of what passed for a “conservatory” in student accommodation. But the cheese incident is the one that remains fresh in my memory.

Said incident was at least ten years ago now, but when we met up in the village pub for a pint and a chat it was like that time had ceased to exist—or at least didn’t matter. We hadn’t seen each other for ages, and yet suddenly we were back to talking about the word “COCK!”, driving in search of “old man pubs” and ending up in the local Tesco garage’s forecourt at 2 in the morning eating pre-packed sandwiches because the nearest club (15 miles away) was shit and/or full, and the old man pubs in question were either shut or had vanished into some sort of rural space-time anomaly. It was, to say the least, awesome. Not all reunions go this way, and I’m sure there are plenty of people I was at school with who are completely different people now. But then I have no idea where they are now, so a reunion is unlikely anyway.

The other example I have in mind is something I wrote about way back on Day 106; the idea of crystallised memories. I probably didn’t coin this term but it’s one I’m particularly fond of: the idea that inanimate objects can possess memories and trigger powerful emotional responses simply by their presence. A crystallised memory can be a tiny thing, like a dirty penny you find in the depths of your coat pocket. Perhaps you remember how it got so dirty. Or where you found it. Or what you were doing when you dropped it into your pocket.

Alternatively, as the case may be, a crystallised memory could be a whole city. Cities are places that are full of life, constantly on the move, changing, morphing, filling with people during the day and evaporating them in the dead of night. But some things don’t change amidst all the chaos—pretty amazing in itself, when you think about it—and those are the things which hold powerful emotional responses, powerful memories, senses of nostalgia, whatever it is you want to call it.

Sometimes, these things which have remained constant amidst the chaos of the daily tsunami of people that pass by them are enough to remind you of something or someone important, something that is, at times, long-forgotten. Tiny little memories which, at the time, seemed inconsequential, unimportant. And yet they are the ones which remained most vivid. A river that you once saw a hundred rubber ducks racing along. A swinging teashop sign and the delicious delights found within. The low beam that you bang your head on as you clamber into an “authentic” old pub.

Sometimes you see all those things again and they cause you pain. They remind you of what once was and what is now no longer.

And sometimes you see all those things again and they bring comfort. They still remind you of what once was and what is now no longer. But something, somewhere, causes the negativity and the pain to slip away and you’re left with those things that you should cling onto, the crystals that shine the brightest, the ones which glitter eternally.

Time heals all wounds, they say. But the good stuff that all the blood and pus and “discharge” from the wounds hides? (That was gross. Sorry.) That sticks around a whole lot longer.

#oneaday, Day 270: Go Go Gadget, uhh, Gadget

I love gadgets. Anyone who knows me in “real life” will not be surprised by this revelation. But I’m always impressed by quite how much we can do with various little portable implements these days. And even not quite so recently, too.

The most recent mind-blowing moment I had was during this last week when I had my little expedition to the woods. I was standing in the middle of a forest with absolutely no trace of civilisation except a little crude wooden bench by the side of the muddy path. And somehow I had better mobile signal than I do in the house I’m sitting right now. So, without thinking, I popped out my iPhone and fired up eBuddy to say hello to my buddy Chris in California. He responded back and we had a nice discussion about music.

Let’s just think about that a minute. I was in the middle of a wood in Cambridgeshire, England. Chris was somewhere in sunny California. And yet there we were, chatting away like this was a perfectly normal thing to do. That’s awesome.

One of my favourite gadget moments, though, was a good few years back now. I was up in Edinburgh at the Fringe with the Southampton University Theatre Group, or “Rattlesnake!” as we’d inexplicably decided to call ourselves. At the time, I had somehow managed to end up with the responsibility of keeping the Theatre Group website up to date. I’d prepared a special Edinburgh page and everything, and I decided that it would be pretty awesome to keep an online diary. The concept of “blogging” was but a pipe dream for all but the biggest nerds (even bigger than me) at this point. And doing so via a mobile device was absolutely out of the question.

I did, however, have my Palm Tungsten with me, to date my second-favourite gadget after my iPhone. You could play Shining Force on it, for heaven’s sake. That’s awesome, if beside the point. No, the reason my Palm came in handy was that I could type up my diary entries into the Notes application on it and then use the handily-provided SD card (32MB!) to transfer said material to a computer in the conveniently-located Internet café we found one day.

One may ask why I didn’t just type said diary entries straight into the computers. Well, the advantage of doing it on the Palm was that I could write things as they happened. I could write a rehearsal report. I could write what we were up to in the park. I could write about flyering the Royal Mile. The Frankenstein pub. (AMAZING) Being on top of Arthur’s Seat drinking sake as the sun rose. (DOUBLEPLUSAMAZING)

Sure, I could have written about these things after the fact. But the immediacy of being able to write about it there and then was pretty damn cool. Each new generation of gadgets makes this sort of thing easier and easier to do. And while it has its downsides—the sea of people filming concerts on their mobile phones instead of actually watching the damn things being one—on the whole I think it’s really great to be able to share life’s exciting little moments (or, in the case of some of you out there, the details of your latest bowel movements) with people that you care about it. Of course some of this is vanity. But the other side of it is being able to share things with people that you don’t get to hang out with as often as you like.

So gadgets are awesome. For everyone. Not just nerds.

#oneaday, Day 261: Random Access Memories

It’s weird, the things you remember over time. Perhaps it’s just me. But I’ve found over time that I have a fantastic memory for completely pointless crap and yet I can quite easily forget the things I need to buy from the shop in the space between stepping out of the house and reaching said shop.

So I thought I’d share a few stupid memories today for no apparent reason. I have hundreds of these. So this topic may return at some point in the future. For today, I’m going to focus on memories from my childhood.

First up: the ad starting at 2:17 of this vid right here:

Phurnacite. I’m still not entirely sure what it is, or was. But I remember this advert freaking me the fuck out when I was little despite, I believe, only ever seeing it once. Watching it now, it’s completely laughable, overacted and utter nonsense. For the longest time, I couldn’t even remember it was something to do with cookers. I remembered the image of the “doctors” with the masks on, though, and the woman crying going “HOW WILL I FEED MY FAMILY?”

Why do I remember that? That holds absolutely no benefit to me whatsoever unless taking part in a particularly specialist pub quiz on the subject of TV adverts from Christmas 1989 that freaked me the fuck out.

On a related note, the magazine advert for Mindscape’s surgery-em-up game for the PC, Life and Death, also featured doctors in masks, bloodstained swabs and the like and also freaked me the fuck out. I have never been in hospital for an operation, and those adverts were the reason I was terrified of the prospect of ever having to do so. Disappointingly, Google Images has let me down on an actual picture of said advert. But it was in an issue of A.C.E. magazine. Which was 1) possibly the best multi-format magazine of all time, now sadly defunct and 2) the only games magazine I’m aware of that rated games out of 1,000.

At some other point during my childhood, another completely random memory I have is to do with visiting the chap who was my best friend at the time. We’d acquired some weird little toys called “Wiggly Gigglies” (yes, laugh it up, it was the 80s) and much to my chagrin, friend in question had acquired a glow-in-the-dark one. I was fascinated by the idea of a glow-in-the-dark anything at the time, so one or both of us decided that it would be a really fantastic idea to lock ourselves in his airing cupboard to see that luminousness at work. Unfortunately, the airing cupboard wasn’t really big enough to even fit two kids inside, so I ended up shutting two of my fingers in the door and it really fucking hurt. It didn’t break them or anything, but they were bleeding a bit. I went home shortly afterwards, and resolved never to do two things: touch a Wiggly Giggly again, and shut myself in an airing cupboard again.

In that case, the pain is probably the trigger to the memory. But as I kid, I hurt myself quite a bit—kids will be kids and all that. It’s strange how that incident in particular sticks in my mind.

Let’s cap this off with a third memory. What I like to call The Great Injustice. It was lunchtime at primary school, and I was enjoying a game with a girl called Anna with whom I had something of an off-on-off-on friendship in that way primary school kids do. Particularly kids of the opposite sex.

I forget the exact details of said game, but it involved swordfighting. Or rather, stick-fighting. Our school field had a number of big trees on it, and they often dropped decent-size sticks that were great for mock swordfights. And so it was that Anna and I were staging some sort of battle for some reason. It was fun. Lunchtime ended and we went inside.

When I got home that evening, I got absolutely bollocked. Turns out my mother had been wandering past the school field at the time we’d been playing our game, at a point when I’d evidently been “winning”. As a result, I found myself in a lot of trouble for “hitting a girl with a stick”. And no amount of protestation could convince my parents that it had, in fact, been just a game, and if you talked to Anna she would back up my story. Because, after all, who believes the screeches that come out of the mouth of an eight-year old when they’re in trouble?

Hmm. These aren’t terribly positive memories, are they? Perhaps I should make more of an effort to remember things that didn’t freak me out or make me incandescent with an eight-year old’s rage!