Lots of Blogging coming up. Photoblogging from todays Tornado in Birmingham, courtesy of BBC Picture Gallery



This is the Bristol Road, just by Bournville Police Station. insane.



SparkBrook High Street. I used to travel down this every day for work.


The Tornado starting to form.


Damage, Moseley.


Cambridge Road, Moseley.


Sparkbrook High Street, again. This will look very familiar to at least a couple of bloggers who freqeuent the 37 route. Hiya Chig Hiya!


Iceland, Kings heath.



Sparkbrook High Street, a bit further down.

This road is the major artierial route into town from the west of the Birmingham. Was.


Streweth!

Looks like I only caught a fraction of it.Thank God.

Bit of a newsflash.



BIRMINGHAM HIT BY TORNADO


I was caught in it. Could have been much worse ; judging by the fact that 50 ambulances have been dispatches, 12 are injured, and windspeeds are estimated hby the Met office to have reached up to 130mph. (Also see here )


Even miles from the epicentre, It was still pretty rough. I had a medical appointment up Rubery Great Park this afternoon, saw the clouds and decided that the grey skies might lead to a bit of rain, so packed my hoody as a last minute thing.

About an hour later I was looking out of the medical cente at the rain. I thought, fuck it, im going to get wet either way so I'll walk to the nearest bus stop, it's about 100 yards. I didn't know how fucking wet I was gonna get. I'm not a third of the way there when My feet are soaking. (Great time to discover you've a hole in yr shoes, by the way). By the time I get the bus stop, visibility has shrunk to about 20 yards. Lights in the distance appear out of nowhere, the doppler effect of sound whooshing around me whilst I squint.

I've never been happier to see a sheltered bus stop in my life. Except that the cars deliberately stay on the side next to the pavement to sploosh pedestrians. The waves richochet three feet up into the air like a wall of water. This is why I spend my time not sat down, but standing on the seats in the bus shelter, crouched so I don't get soaked from the splash.The water from a lorry going past ast speed reaches my eye level - 8 feet above the ground. It's then that I realise the lorry driover was honking his horn because he thought that people getting soaked from head to toe and then having to walk miles was like, funny. And its at this point that the visibility closes in.

The Bus turns up, and I get off at the island at the end for the next part of my journey. The Other side of the Bristol Road/Longbridge island is completely impassable. The traffic cones for the road improvements are sinking. The water is halfway up the cones, obscuring the bottom flat of them, and halfway up the orange marker in the middle. That's about 2 to 3 feet of water, thats fallen in a matter of half an hour.



The water is so deep, its broken it's banks so to speak, and is just pouring across the double carriageway, into the the next line of cars. There's a JCB we pass, and the clearance underneath is non existenty, just a torrent of muddy brown rain water
thats almost seems to be pushing it off the road and into the carpark. The drive is trying to reverse back, but the engine isnt starting, and the water is pouring across like a flood.

Some people on the BBC end up osting sarcastic comments about "I realised it was no ordinary storm when i looked out of the window and saw a couple of guys in a rowboat, then a lady on a bike blew past and turned into a witch!", but the reality is really fucking scary when you're trapped in a tornado. The Iceland in Kings Heath has been on news 24, minus it's frontage that has been torn off. Winds have torn the roof off a number of shops in Kings Heath high street, and thats nowhere near the epicentre. Where I was still was bad enough, it's really an odd experience. Very odd indeed.Even the mighty chig comments on it, on the BBC webpage there. (All hail chig!)

Incidentally, its the strongest tornado recorded in Englsand since 1931.

A Met Office spokesperson said: "From the reports we have heard we would estimate that this is a tornado with a rating of T3-T4, that would mean it had wind speeds of between 93-114 mph for T3 and 114-130 for T4. A typical description would be that motorcars were lifted and destroyed, roofs removed from buildings and weak buildings destroyed. We have an average of 33 reports of tornadoes in the UK each year but these are especially rare in built-up areas and there has not been one of this strength in many years. City centres are not the natural habitat of a tornado; the tall buildings would normally stop their formation."

According to the BBC:-
"The last time Britain was hit with such a severe tornado was back in 1931. It hit virtually the same area, the Small Heath and Hall Green districts of the city. Back then one woman died. So where did today's come from? At around midday there was a line of thunderstorms stretching right across the country from mid Wales to London.

As they moved north, the storm grew in intensity. When it hit south Birmingham, Kings Heath, at about 2.30 this afternoon, it had become even stronger and turned into a tornado. It moved northwards across the city - although not as intense."


*

And I thought the Day After Tomorrow was fiction....

And only 3 hours after the event, do the BBC realise this might be an important new story, and lug it from the rarely visited local pages up to the main page as the MAIN headline. like, duh.







Kings Heath high street





* this one is in coventry, last month, not the one in birmingham, by the way

DO You Like Star Wars?

Well, I can't reccommend this highly enough. A 47 minute fan film, and it looks and feels So Star Wars, its untrue ; its almost as if someone put the pilot episode of the TV show up online. Damn good fun. (Of course, when its a bunch of fans doing it, the acting is a bit campy and trashy, but so far its pressing all the right buttons.)
And yuou know its good when the bbc starts ranting on about how good is, CLICKY ,especially given that it was made for $17,000." Its entitled Star Wars Revalations "

CLICK for mirrors and download sites

Not a plug for something, but just something that makes me feel "ooooh!" again about star wars. Sad, I know.

This is Elvis.



He hops out of his cage, bright and full of life, perches up on his two hind legs, and sniffs the air deeply. Because All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when ever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you: digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed, Elvis.

I love him deeply. He is occasionally smart, lovable, loving, mischevious, adorably cute and incredibly endearing - like when he runs around in circles doing 'binkies' ; which means he is happy, apparently. Occasionally, he bullies the cat by jumping up on the sofa next to the cat and running around the cat with laser eyes, maeve. Maeve, being a big softy cat who wouldn’t hurt a fly and being incredibly timid, sees the rabbit as the big bully he is, and bops him one with her paw, and Elvis runs away. Elvis then jumps up again, and like the experiment where Lisa Simpson tries to ask 'IS my brother dumber than a hamster?', he does it over and over again. 5 times in ten minutes. Elvis perhaps isn't as smart as I thought he was - in fact, he is as daft as a box of fluffy grey spanners.

Sadly this also applies to electricity. Being a natural ...erm....eater of anything, this means anything that is in his reach normally is under danger of being nibbled. The book of Oscar Wilde's complete works propping up the sofa, the WilliamBurroughs reader - that sort of thing. Oh, and electrical cables.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that combination of bored rabbit eating electric cables isn't a healthy one. That’s why most of the time I'm always listening out for the faint sound of gnawing (rustle rustle rustle) in the background. This means I have to shout at him a lot so he runs away from the electrical cables, or chase him away, especially early in the morning.

Sadly much as I love Elvis, he is in the doghouse today. Or as we call it, a hutch.

Last night I was pottering away as normal, checking some cd's I'd been burning, and took a CD out of the tray. Before I replaced it, the faint sound of rustling could be heard. It hadn’t been the first time - probabpy the 10th time in as many minutes. And I couldn't see Elvis, So I ran to the back of the TV, and there he was, his mouth innocently wrapped around a Scart cable. Bad Elvis.I suppose with his small rabbit like brain, he might not understand its not food, but that wouldn’t make the resulting electrical shock any less fatal. So I told him off, and he ran off. If you're going to be a bad rabbit, and misbehave like that, well, no chocolate treaties for you Elvis - and its off to the Hutch for the night. Perfectly rational decision at 2.30AM, I thought.

Elvis, Had other plans. These plans involved running away, escaping, hiding, and eating a few more electrical cables. In general, Elvis planned on being a pain in the arse. What this running away involves is quite simple -hiding under the baby pen, hiding under the sofa, hiding behind the sofa, hiding behind the computer desk, and running between all four quicker than I can chase him or get a grip on his Teflon fur.

He's under the sofa when he decides to escape by running under the computer desk and make a loop, a circular circuit until he is back under the sofa. (He does this a lot, by the way). Unfortunately for him, I am still by the computer desk. I reach down to grab him So I can take him to his hutch, but I lose my footing as fur dashes underfoot, which means I wasn't able to stick my foot down where I needed to not to fall over, and the rabbit trips me up. I topple slightly backwards, but something stops me with a Clanking noise.There shouldn’t have been anything to stop my fall, mind you.

It was the open tray of the cd player that stopped me. I press enter, but the tray doesn’t retract. It moves slightly, but my weight has shifted the tray out of alignment with the mechanism. Its at this point, I have a Hellboy moment, and go "Oh, crap." (Like Hellboy, I like kittens, but I can take or leave the Nacho's). The automatic retraction in and out mechanism is damaged and won't work properly. You can still cd's in and out of the player, by getting hold of the lip which protrudes out and either pulling it out or pushing it in manually, which is shitty, but ideally It would work as before, which it doesn't. The player still works properly, the only problem is getting the cds in and out takes a little more effort.

All I wanted the rabbit to do was stop eating cables. Now look what happened, and he calls me a spastic simply because his rabbit tripped me up. Its not m ault he eats cables, and I'm supposed to stop him doing that, and the best way was to take him out so I could go to bed. Contrary to what mark would have you believe, making the cd player out of Duplo and big bright primary colours wouldn’t have made any bloody difference to the fact that the rabbit got under my feet whilst I was trying to pick him up and he tripped me up.Nor does it make me an idiot, because it’s a simple accident that could have happened to you also. In fact, if he hasn’t gone through life without finding elvis under his feet at least once, I'd be amazed. Its wasn’t a case of not using common sense (I wasn’t running around, the rabbit was), and the fact I was tyring to catch your rabbit to stop him from eating cables doesn't make me a nincompoop either. Its just an accident, that’s all, and itsw understandable to be angry, but do you really thing I wanted to break the bloody thing? Like, duh.

Anyway, I have since devised a method which is a little better for stopping him eating cables than listening for rustling - ,it involves moving the TV unit back so that there's insufficient gap between that and the back wall for a rabbit to get through anymore. Incredibly straightforward, and it stops him hurting himself on electrics and causing damage, I've also stopped the monitor switching itself off every 5 seconds. The latter involves not sticking a flannel over the power sockets, and not sticking a cardboard box round the back of the monitor cables, forcing the connectors and monitor connection socket by lifting them out of place at an angle. That might help for now.As for Elvis, well....he's staying in his hutch for today.


Elvis and the HI-Fi system of doom. (Contents may settle in transit)

That might have a lot to do with the fact that he eventually sauntered out to the hutch of his own violition five minutes after the incident, but its got much more to do with the fact ive not left the house since Tuesday and am gonna pop up town for the first time since I arrived here on Monday. I Will not be carrying a rucksack, because I don't want to get shot in the face five times at point blank range in some legally sanctioned "kill the darkies" style execution.

Mind you, after the "shoot to kill" orders responsible for the deaths of three suspected terrorists shot to death in Gibraltar in 1988 and when someone was arrested at the gunpoint of a HK-MP5 semi-automatic submachine gun simply for strolling around Whitehall yesterday with the wrong colour skin , I shouldn't expect anything else nowadays.Call that contentious, but in England we don’t tend to shoot people dead do we? No, We're just used to bombing the fuck out of people in far away lands instead......

Toodlepip.

As you might know, there's been another attack in london. I found out at about half one, at which point the interwibble went offline for an inexplicable reason.

There were four explosions: The tube stations at Warren Street, Shepards Bush, and Oval. There was also a bomb on a No.26 bus in Columbia Road, Hackney, which was reportably from a backpack; Eyewitness reports that the driver heard a bang on the upper deck, when he stopped the bus to look, windows had been blown out, but nobody hurt apparently. As for Warren Street; an eye witness account on reuters stated that the "bomb" at warren street was a nail bomb. Someone ran onto the tube and dumped the bag and ran off again. They didn't manage to catch the person. No one injured.

Preliminary reports confirm one injury so far - but there will be others. University College Hospital has been Cordoned off, and is swarmed with armed police. Some of the people admitted to hospital were accompanied by sniffer dogs, presumably sniffing for traces of explosives. Rumour has it that one bomber has survived and was admitted with injuries. Every 20 minutes or so, the police expand the cordon around University College Hospital by 200 feet or so. I'm watching it on the BBC as the police move the reporters back and back and back. And there's just been a talking head on the BBC saying that an internal memo has been circulated at UCH where staff where warned to look for a single male, 6ft to 6ft 2in, with wires poking from his top. They believe he ran from one of the bombing sites - Warren street? - to hide in UCH.

And As i write, Whitehall is being sealed off.

At 15.20, they've just arrested someone. One man in a dark grey trousers, and a completely opened shirt, was stopped in Whitehall, 20 yards from the gates to Downhall Street, stood directly outside the Ministry of Defence. He was kept on the floor for two minutes, and then arrested by two Armed police officers with weapons drawn, who then reportadly escorted him into Richmond House.

At 15.29, the police go forward and tell the BBC to tell turn their camera's off outside downing street.There's a press conference due imminently.

One caller on the BBC (at 2.21pm) stated that An young dark man (probably Asian) , aged 17-18, was seen running from Warren Street tube station shortly after the explosions in a state of confusion, looking left and right. He was being pursued by police.

In the last few minutes, reports say that several 'dummy' nail bombs have been found. These would be rucksacks with detonators or blasting caps, but no actual explosives; designed to look like nailbombs; apparently some may have had nails in them. The blasting caps will go off, creating noise and confusion, but very minimal damage. Well, minimal by comparison to last time.

According to people in carriages NEXT to where one of the explosions took place, there was a strange smell, not like normal burning, which is when they were first aware of the incident. Even though they were in the carriage next to the explosion, they heard no sound of bombs or explosions.

The upshot is this: Minimal physical damage -maximum disruption and chaos. Not exactly a hoax as such, but it seems to have been designed to create the most alarm and disruption with a minimum of casualties. It's easy to scare people, and whilst www.wearenotafraid.com is all jingoistic and so ; I'm not scared either. Because ultimately there's nothing i can about any of it - its all out of my hands. Its in the hands of god, whichever god there is.

Outside the window, I can hear sirens.

Google Moon . It's ace. Especially When you go close....

Funnily enough, Panda Man wasn't the only wierd thing that happened today. Nor either, was the highlight of the day watching the utter quirky comic genius that is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It's great, but I can understand why a lot of people just didn't get it. It's magnificent, but like a lot of things, it is an acquired taste. No, The other wierd thing happened travelling to my brothers.

Mainly because, I've never been in a genuine bonafide terrorist alert before - Unless you count the time a drunk left a bottle of booze at Grantham Station back in 1991, and it got exploderised whilst we walked aroudn the town getting drunk on cheap cider from office before realising there was no way we could get home now courtesy of the two hour delay on a cold sunday night in November.

It didn't look right, pulling into the station. For a start, there's no one there. I mean, no one. Every platform is deserted. Not a single one of the 12 platforms has a train on it. Normally this station should be rammed and bustling, and busy as hell. It's not.The station, it was like a ghost.

Quite why they let the train stop there, I didnt have a clue. Surely the most stupid thing you could do in a situation like this when trying to evacuate a station would be to let trains stop, bringing people into the closed area and further exposing them to danger, maximising the risk and potential casualties.

It certainly doesnt make much sense when the only thing on the tannoy is a continually repeated annoucement which is utterly nonsensical (it's along the lines of SOUTHWEST TRAINS COMMUNICATIONS CENTER ANNOUNCEMENT)and every single one of the viewscreens has the same message

" THE STATION IS CLOSED
Please leave immeadiately"

So, close the station for a security alert, and still let trains stop there and let people disembark? Does any prt of that not compute?

In that typically British way, my first response was "oh, fucking hell" and a shrug of despair because I'm going to be delayed and my transport plans have been fucked up. Thats as my immediate concern, and it was far more annoying than suddenly finding myself covered in someone else's blood, or minus a limb. I know that sounds melodramatic, but I really wasn't thinking about dying. Not today. Maybe a few decades down the line,with my three score and ten and hopefully a few bonus years with my children bringing me their own children to dote over, but not today. I was not afraid - as the cliche goes. I was annoyed because I would be delayed until god knows when, and All I was thinking about getting to see my Brother ; not sitting in a Burger King or walking around a suburban high street bored out of my goddamn mind hungry and with no money, but with an awful lot of luggage.

SO, what Can I do? Look confused? Realise that I am actually in danger of being blown up? Yes to the former, not the latter. I'm annoyed at myself that I didn't get back on the train to the next station the moment I saw that sign, and as a result stranded myself awaiting a connection. So I do the only thing I realistically can do - walk up the stairs and out of the station.I phone my brother and speak to him, just to keep him appraised of the situation. No sooner has he rung me back than they re-open the station and I'm walking back to the platofrm I left about 4 minutes earlier.

And then its all over, as quickly and randomly as it began.

The man in front of me is eating leaves.

Yes, thats right. Leaves.

Man, that is wierd. He just got on the coach and is sat in front of me. He moved to sit one row back closer to me, and boy, does he smell. That unwashed smell of lived in clothing, clothing which hasn't been changed and gone stale; it reminds me of shopping centres. Specifically, old people, in shopping centres, walking interminably slowly and gawping at everything no matter how commonplace. Well, thats this smell. The Smell of old people who've stayed at home for years and got so used to their own smell they forget it's not normal to exude the sweet and delicate fragrance of decades of rotting newspaper. And yes, I'm sat behind him. In fact, he even moved to sit closer to me. Is it deliberate? Am I paranoid? And does the who and why matter compared to the fact that he is really being guilty of asocial behaviour ?

Ok, so the leaves thing is freaky. But ya know, I can live with it. He's got a bunch of twigs next to him - twigs, stalks, whatever - in a blue plastic bag. The kind of bag you get when the shop can't afford personalised shopping bags. The stalks, or whatever they are, are perfectly precisely cut to the exact same length. They are identical, each and every one of them, wrapped up in their plastic bag. And He takes out one twig at a time, and picks off the leaves from them, and eats them. Then drops the stalks on the floor of the coach.

And then he stops. Thank God he's stopped eating the leaves.(It's probably some religious thing, but it's still something you don't see every day).

And a cloud of smoke appears in front of me. Suddenly I feel like I'm trapped in one of 1982's finest films, and the line You've got to be fucking kidding has just drifted into my head.

Now, Im fairly used to people smoking on public transport. It happens all the time, especially on buses. It's just something you get used to in Birmingham , and mainly on bus routes ending in "9". Those are the roughest - especially the 49 and the 69. In those cases, you're gonna be off the bus in some 15 to 20 minutes anyway, and anyway, the people who smoke on buses are so goddamn hard they only ever smoke on the top deck, and at the back. Just like the naughty schoolkids they never grew out of flunking GCSE's, and who lack the balls to conquer a nicotine addiction. And they are so hard they only smoke as far away from the driver as physically possible. Yea, thats really sticking it on the man. As far as I'm concerned, thats chickenshit bullshit rebellion, and if you can't abide by the fact that you're not so much rebelling as being a selfish prick with no concern for other people who don't want to spend their lives dying of lung cancer, well, I've no sympathy. Look at the other people with addictions - do heroin addicts start taking thier methadone on the bus? Do you see drunks swilling Bottles of paint thinner on the backseat to work? And did you ever see Michael Douglas, self-confessed Sex Addict, furiously masterbating on live TV interviews because he can't control himself and his addiction? No, you didn't...and if you ever did, you'd find him with a conviction for public indecency. Well, if addicts can control themselves for the duration of twenty minutes or so at a time, then how come these nicotine addicts can't? So, why, oh fucking why , can't you just be a little considerate for others who don't share your self-afflicted addiction? What makes your drug addiciton so fucking special exactly, that others have to partake of it simply by accident of being in the wrong place as the wrong time?

I've never heard of anyone ever suffering from "Passive Heroin Use", having found heroin in their system simply because someone in the same tower block they live in also used it. I've never found anyone whose ended up with liver sclerosis because of "Passive Drinking", where they ended up with alcohol accidentally in their mouth because they happened to be in the same place and at the same time as someone who partook of a glass of warm, fizzy, lager - have you?

By comparison, I could handle the leaves. They were nothing - nothing at all - compared to being stuck for three hours behind this guy in his fifties who smells worse than I look, trapped on a single decker bus whilst he smokes in a confined space in contravention to every rule of the terms of carriage. And pissing everyone else off. I tell you, if he can get away with it, well using his logic so can I. If its good enough for him to indulge his in asocial beaviour with his addictions in public places, well, so can I. Next time I'm at work and have that embarrassing erection under my desk mid afternoon, I'm just gonna whip it out and have a wank. Same logic. I mean, if he thinks its ok to indulge his addiction where he shouldn't why can't i?

I think you can see where I'm coming from - Some habits are best not indulged in public. Thats one of them. (And no, I wasn't being serious about the wank at work suggestion - I was taking his selfishness and simply applying to another aspect of socially unacceptable compulsive behaviour).

So, Whats the best way to deal with this problematic situation?

Walk down the front, and mention it to the driver. That way it is a complaint from a passenger about another passengers conduct, and he has the legal authority to chuck him off the coach, something I can't do.

So, The driver comes down. "Right", says the driver to smelly guy, "You're not smoking any more.It's a £1000 fine if you do. And If you light up again, I'm stopping the coach, and you're walking from that point on."

He didn't light up again. He just carried on munching leaves like a fucking panda.

I slept the rest of the way to london.

He can write about me all he likes. It doesn't make his assessment of it correct. Especially as there is so much about me he doesn't know, because I haven't told him. What if, however, the odd behaviour, is just a part of me I haven'ttold him about? Something I'm scared of how he will accept it, be critical of, judge me of, and think lesser of me. Well, even less than he already does.

Somethings you don't say because you are scared of how people will take them. Judge you for it. Without undersanding or knowing the full extent of what is going on, there's no way they can really come to the right conclusion.

As I say, I feel like I'm on the cusp of becoming something I wasn't along time ago. Its a difficult and awkward time for me, but I do feel a bit happier for having come to terms with it myself. I just don't know how else everyone else will take it.

Normally late at night, this blogging lark has been a bit of an uphill struggle as of late. It takes something out of the me. The words don't flow as quickly as easily as they used to. This is not good for someone whose made a career out of well.......pretending to be a writer. I can string a few sentences together, but don't expect much. I mean, I don't.

Thats how I feel sometimes when I sit down to write. Or the actual fact of sitting in front of a PC screen working. It makes me feel very very similar in both instances.

At the moment, my situation is , erm....precarious. i spend time as and where I can. A friend offers me a sofa, I stay there for a few days, hang out there, you get the picture. I get letters from the council, normally along the lines of "we havent got anywhere for you to live", and that sort of thing.(Yes Tom, I did finally do as you suggested, and the matter is currently under review. Thats what todays post was about).

However, I have faith and trust that in the end, I will find my feet eventually.

As for the post where I allude to Everything's Changing...Well, I am. I find myself looking back over the time I had with my wife with not so much regret as well, horror. I knew it wasn't right for us to marry, yet Marry I did because I wanted to. I wanted it to be right, to finally have found stopped searching for the one, and well, such regrets make no difference now to the now eventual outcome.

Since the marriage ended, I've been trying to get on with my life. Put it back together, bit by bit. Its a matter of doing it step by step, in little increments, rather than letting it slide into the unholy mess it had been (or has been) in the past. The first step for me, is to get a place to live. A place for myself, somewhere I belong, somewhere I can call home and feel settled, Where I can be myself. For so long I've felt like I've had to censor myself and my behaviour because of being in a relationship. I don’t mind compromise, but unnecessary compromise to the point where you feel it's stifling is horrible. At that point you’re longer working together, but against the other. Everything I did was censored, or self-censored, as not to upset her, from the films I watch - no swearwords, no violence, no sex to the books and music I played - courtesy of the Mad Mormon wife who then as soon as she had got rid of me, left the church completely for what I can follow. I look forward to the day when I no longer have to censor myself, and can be who I really am. I'm not that objectionable, honestly.

Having somewhere to live and be myself is the first little increment, the first step. That gives me stability.

From that stability comes a feeling of being grounded. The feeling of rootlessness will dissapate. The second step is sorting out some employment. From this, everything else follows, piece by piece, step by step, until hopefully a few months down the line, I'm a fully functioning normal human being again, rather than the insecure wreck I feel like right now. Im not going to deny it, I've got a fair bit of stuff to work through, and I won't be the same person at the other end of it that I am right now.

I feel like I'm on the cusp of change. Exiting one relationship, one phase of my life (the starter marriage with the first wife, which coincidentally rhymes with Worst ; coincidence schmoincidence eh?) and beginning another life. I'm growing older, my life is changing like life always does. No longer am I the 18 year old I used to be, nor the aimless 26 year old - Now I'm the aimless 32 year old who should have sorted his life out a little bit out by now.

I feel like I'm on cusp of growing up to be the sort of person I always dreamt to be, or meant to be. On the verge of becoming something new. (God, how pretentious). Im changing, gorwing older, and in a way, I'm Leaving the old graham behind, become something else, something different. Metamorphosis in a way. Im just being positive and upbeat about the future for a change - and its not so much a re-invention as a just evolution or progession. From what I was - an unhappily married man who felt he was in a stranglehold of a relationship, into a positive, upbeat 30something divorcee, freed at last. (where as before, I was a 30nothing)

You can call it "growing up" a bit if you like.

After the marriage collapsed I felt I was floundering around a lot and in a transitionary phase - and not just because of the breakdown of the marriage, but also because I feel like a teenager again, just because I feel like I'm changing into something I never used to be. I used to be comfortable and was used to being what I was because I'd never known anything else - just following the programmed pattern of 2.4 kids, dog, mortgage and having the ulitimate life goal of a better hedgetrimmer 't - but I just had this slow realisation that I didn’t have to be what I'd been programmed to be. So I feel much more open and relaxed now with that now than I ever used to be.

I've had a good few months to get used to how its been changing, or to prepare to the way things will change both in terms of accommodation and employment, but also personally in other area's of my life. I think about what I was,and it's not who I am anymore. People have preconceptions, established images of what you are like, and I'm not now what I was then, when a few months ago I was on the verge of a breakdown. I'm in the process of putting myself back together without having to fight who I am anymore, and it feels much better than the mindfuck of a place I was in a few months ago.

I've nothing to gain and everything to lose by writing this blog, and I feel very unsure about the changes that are happening and talking about them. Some of them will certainly rock my world to its core - I'm quite scared of it, of how people will take it. I keep on expecting to be hurt by people, especially given the collapse of my last relationship (the marriage one). Its just right now, in my personal headspace, where my life is heading feels like the right path to me. I hope so anyway.

And when I do finally get it sorted and learn to drive, I want this car.



Can you blame me?

You Are a Social Blogger!

Your blog is more of a semi-private affair for your friends. It's how you keep in touch... sharing stories, jokes, and pics.

What kind of blogger are you?

Just got back from War of The Worlds.

"Worst film ive seen in a long long time" said Giles."pure eye candy with nothing up top" I say."ooooooh!" goes everyone else at the fx

It just feels unfinished to me. Visually, technically stunning, magnificent fx and some fantastic action scenes. But the script just feels unfinished. It just ends. No climax, nothing. Just a convientnent macguffin to end it all.

In fact the script could be summed up as follows:-
"Aliens invade earth. And they are very very angry.

Look scared Mr. Scientologist Tom, maybe its those nasty Thetans from Planet Xenu.

Run away! KABOOM! (repeat until bored) .

THE END"

Its in plus side, at least the Aliens don't use Apple Macs, nor have these aliens completely forgotten their Norton AntiVirus subscriptions neither.

Great effects - damn fine action sequences - its a two hour long rollercoaster ride of effects sequences and stuff blowing up. And thats all. No depth. No subtext. Just the hard slog through to the end credits. And it just fizzles out into nothing and fades away at the end....

just like this post.

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WHEN GOOD POP STARS GO BAD:-

SO, you've seen Batman begins then? Well i haven't. But along pop up[s only one of englands lesser pop icons, Tim Booth of James....


Well, eh sure does look different. And if you think he looks very familiar, there's a very good reason for it. maybe he's modelling himself on a certain character foprm a certain Bruckeheimer movie back in the good old days...



Hmmm.Looks like the marketing plan for the recent James reissues didn't quite succeed, and they had to resort to the "Buy this album or the bunny gets it" tactic. Not quite what I expected form madchester's very own Kibbutz loving vegetarian space cadet, eh?

You need to read This . (Thanks to chig, who posted it on his blog.)

No words can really explain what happened yesterday. I'm not even going to try.

Out of those photo's above, its the middle image that gets me. I wasn't going to use it, until I saw her hand. Bandaged up. And then I realised she had been there, has been wounded and in hospital, and tose flowers...they would have been for someone she knew. maybe someone she sat next on the train that morning. Someone who will she will never go to work with again.

I'm going to continue with the photoblogging;They will explain more than I can right now. If you are on dalup, you will hate me. Sorry Neil. (This is especially True as they are Bitmaps, which is the only way I could find the images)

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Firstly, the most important link for images I have found is this here

Like Dragnet, just the facts; according to the press conference given earlier.

::: More than 50 fatalities.
:: Still bodies on tube train between Russell Square and King's Cross.
:: Twenty-two people in a critical condition in hospital. Three hundred and fifty people treated in hospital, 100 detained. One person died in hospital. Seven hundred casualties in all.
:: Definitely only four sites of blasts. Absolutely nothing to suggest it was a suicide bombing attack although nothing can be ruled out.
:: Forensic investigation suggests each bomb had less than 10 pounds of high explosive.
:: Each device on tube trains was likely to be on the floor of the carriage. Bus bomb may have been on floor or on seat.
:: Investigation will depend on forensic evidence from "very challenging" scenes.:: Police have not yet got near carriage where bomb was on Russell Square/King's Cross train.
:: Public need patience as investigation cannot be rushed.
:: There might still be an al Qaeda cell in operation in UK.
:: Don't know whether claim on al Qaeda website is real.
:: Bombs would have been in rucksack-sized bags or carriers.
:: Nothing to suggest any intelligence has been missed.
:: Work being done to identify bodies.
:: Mobile phone network was not suspended in London to prevent further blasts, but it was considered.

The horrifing thing here is thast one of the carriages destroyed hasn't even been reached yet.As a Tube carriage has 36 seats, The death toll will rise to probably over a hundred; the same number of body bags that London Underground has apparently ordered.

I did have much more, but Blogger ate it. Damn Blogger.(The new wembley looks horible, by the way, look here )