Return visits

It's Sunday afternoon, and whilst the Songs of Praise / Antiques Roadshow inevitability is still a little while away, I nonetheless find myself reminded of that Sunday evening feeling from many years ago when the point in the weekend would always arrive when homework could be ignored no longer.

Some things never change! Just that now it is the work that I brought home for the weekend, with all good intentions, rather than the homework that was due in on Monday morning. I can claim to have done a bit of it, but still my work laptop sits in the other corner of the room looking accusingly at me.

Obviously I'd much rather be doing my own thing. So here I am mucking about on the Mac, uploading photos to Flickr (the never-ending task), browsing the web, reading Kate's blog, and generally avoiding my work!

The Singapore Grand Prix was on today. Didn't actually watch any of the race, but saw a few minutes of the build up, and was reminded that Singapore is another one of those places that is on my must-d0-a-return-visit list, along with pretty much everywhere we went in California, plus Vegas, Boston and New York in the US, and the South of France, Florence and Rome from our cruise holidays.

I have been lucky enough to go to Singapore three times, in 2005, 2007 and 2009, each time thanks to a company that I was working with. Each time I was en route to or from Indonesia and Malaysia so didn't get to stay very long, but from what I saw, it was a great place for a visit.

On my last trip I went on the Singapore Flyer, and carrying on the tradition of visits to Monaco took photos of bits of race track!

On the 2007 trip, Nicky came out to join me for a couple of days. Long way to go for just a couple of days, but we had a great time, and definitely want to go back for a longer visit sometime soon.

Here are a few photos from the 2007 trip:

Perspective

OK, so I had a rubbish day yesterday. There I was feeling confident about what I had to say, but the stuffing was rather knocked out of me with some fairly direct feedback. As those who have to put up with me at home will testify, I wasn't the easiest person to live with straight afterwards, and no doubt some would say that I never am anyway!

Today, I've gradually allowed a little perspective to creep in, and am now feeling much more positive about the experience. I'm sure that the feedback was provided with the best of intentions, and will prove to be very useful, but I think that I needed a little while to process it and see it in that light. My challenge is to stay positive, respond to it, and move onwards and upwards.

Who knows, maybe the ultimate response to the feedback is that the next step along the career path turns out not to be for me, but the benefit of having a little perspective now (not to mention the most supportive wife in the history of the world ever) is helping me to realise that I'm still a worthwhile human being who is doing just about ok as things are. Sure, I would love to achieve the next rung on the ladder, but is it the most important thing in the world, most definitely not. I could spend the next few hours sat here typing out just the tiniest percentage of the things that are, both to me personally and to the wider world.

My plan at this stage is to respond to the feedback given, continue to be positive, put my best foot forward, and then in the words of people far wiser than me, "what is meant to be will be" (there, is that enough cliches in one sentence for you).

No doubt over the next couple of weeks my mood will fluctuate by the day depending on where I am in the cycle of trying again, being told it isn't good enough, dusting myself down, and getting on with it again, but hopefully I can cling on to a little bit of perspective throughout.

Well, there's an extremely self indulgent post for you, but hey, what are blogs for after all!

As an aside, no doubt the people in question are rather too busy to be reading nonsense like this, but good luck if you are moving house tomorrow.

Photos

Photos are precious aren't they? I love my digital cameras, but perhaps they have devalued the currency somewhat. I remember getting my first camera, and being acutely aware that I was limited to the 24 or 36 pictures on the film and that I had to be careful in choosing what shots to take as there was no going back, and I risked the disappointment of getting a whole load of duff ones back from Boots if I mucked things up. Now it's too easy and I click away almost non stop when we're on holiday without a care in the world, knowing that there is no risk associated with taking a whole load of rubbish ones - they can just be deleted, and hey, if I take enough photos, there's bound to be a few good ones in there somewhere.

As the poor unfortunates who have to sit through my holiday snaps will know, I am then hopeless at sorting out the wheat from the chaff and I end up with far too many pictures in my albums ("and there's a picture of the Disney castle from the back, and there's a picture of it upsidedown reflected in the moat, here's one of Mickey in front of the castle, and here some blurred fireworks going off behind it" ... and so on - you get the picture!).

A quick check on iphoto reveals that my California photos from earlier this year run to just over 2,200, and I currently have a total of over 9,000 uploaded to Flickr, of which our dog Barley is tagged as appearing in over 300 of them!

One of my many planned projects (obviously based on there being an infinite number of hours in every day) is to dig out the shoebox-loads of photos from the loft, scan them in and upload them, and then when I've done that I can carry on harassing Dad about borrowing a load more of his old slides to scan and upload them ...

Sometimes, you are reminded of how properly important photos can be, and that happened to me last year when clearing out at Haig Avenue and coming across old photos here and there. I think that most of them have ended up in the garage or basement at Maidstone Road now, but on its way out I did manage to borrow and scan one in. On the back was the inscription "Margate 1950". What it proves is that, other than the colour of her hair, Nan really never did change at all, and also that Dad looks like his Dad, and looking at it, maybe I do just a little bit too - I suppose I must be roughly the same age now as he was when this was taken.

Two songs

I suppose that this is a sign of my vanity, but my website is also my browser's homepage, so whenever I click on a new Safari window, up it pops. As I mentioned in a tweet the other day, at times in this house it is necessary to book your time on the computer, especially now that we've relented and let Jake have his own Facebook account. Even Jake has commented to me that I am seriously overdue for another blog, seeing that the last one was a fortnight ago! Mrs Shrewsday puts me to shame - a daily blog of top quality, rather than my occasional waffle!

There have been numerous occasions over the last two weeks when I've thought that something was worthy of a blog comment, but I have no idea what any of them are now. The last couple of weeks have been fairly busy for all of us, with the joys of school selection tests combined with the equal joy of promotion selection tests. Jake will be done with his after next Saturday. I could be finished in early October, if the powers that be decide that I am no good, or alternatively if they like me then the fun and games will go on until about April - marvellous!

Jake has had his first two football games with his team now, one today and one last Sunday. Both were defeats, but everyone is doing their best to keep the boys' spirits up, reminding them that these are the first two games that they have ever played as a team, and they have been playing against boys who have been playing together for a few seasons already. I was particularly impressed with today's referee - he made a point of having a word with both teams after the final whistle, and when he came over to Jake's team he explained to them how impressed he was with them given that they were just starting out. He said that even though they conceded a few early goals, they kept on trying and stuck at it for the whole match, and that they should be proud of themselves. Well, obviously the team coach and all the Dads are going to say that anyway, but when the ref says it, I hope that it really made an impression on the boys. No fixture next Sunday so they've got another couple of training sessions before their next game.

Jake and I are getting into the sporty thing and went over to the Bridgewood Manor for a game of tennis yesterday (the hotel made famous some years ago by a certain someone wandering in to their restaurant, rather later than planned having been rescuing goldfish, and putting in a request for egg and chips!). Jake is doing really well with his tennis and we will have to go again - beats playing on the street in front of the house. It also looks like the court doesn't get very booked up given that we only phoned on Saturday morning and yet still had our pick of times in the day. They were supposed to charge us £8 for using the court but forgot to do so - made the £5.20 for two Cokes in the bar afterwards slightly less painful!

I've been enjoying listening to Mark Schultz over the last couple of weeks - we bought a couple of his albums from iTunes at a bargain price, and I've fallen in love with the song "Walking Her Home". It reminds me, in terms of sentiment, of Joshua Kadison's "Beautiful in my eyes". (Both of the songs are on Spotify, or on iTunes - check them out, they're fab.)

Both of these two songs are about lifelong love, and they bring a tear to my eye every time that I listen to them - I'm reminded of how lucky I am to have found just that.

A taste sensation

This evening's blog seems to be mostly about the Isle of Wight! Here's why:

Firstly, whilst sailing through the Solent on our cruise a few weeks ago I played the game which has to be played whilst heading East between Fishbourne and Ryde, and that is to spot, and then photograph, the house that we all went to for our summer holidays back in the Eighties. I'm not sure who started the trend (maybe it was us, I'm sure Dad will tell me who found it first) but it wasn't just us who went to Boulders Leigh (not sure if that's the right spelling) in Binstead for a couple of weeks - I clearly remember waving to the Hills as they came off the ferry as we were waiting for it to take us home!

Boulders Leigh was huge, or at least seemed it when I was small. It was still a minute or two in the car from the front gate to the house, which I assume was once one single truly enormous house but which had subsequently been divided into three separate properties. On the Western end was Tower House which was a separate family home, and then in the middle was Boulders Leigh, which itself was a huge three storey five or six bedroom house, and on the other end was the Boulders, where the MacKenzies lived - the couple who owned Boulders Leigh and rented it out to lucky families like us.

Out the back was another huge garden, with a lawn perfect for ball games, woodland paths, and if you kept going long enough you arrived at the sea, and just after that, Mr MacKenzie's boat!

Everyone came on holiday with us to the Isle of Wight at some point or other. Apart from the four of us, I remember fellow holidaymakers including Nanny, Poppa, Rew, Frances, Uncle Fang, Robin, Bec's friend Sue, and my friend Dave (after our first year at the Math in the summer of 1985, so I guess that must mean I've known him for 25 years now).

Anyway, I think that I bagged a decent photo a few weeks ago, and I've just emailed it over to Dad for verification.

As well as being the location of some fabulous family holidays, IOW was also home to some memorable choir holidays. I was reminded of them this evening by my tea, when I revisited the taste sensation first enjoyed at choir holiday teas many years ago. For tea, plates of bread and butter would be put out along with a selection of fillings from which we could make our own sandwiches. The normal choice of fillings would be cheese, jam, and pilchards. No doubt egged on by my fellow angelic choirboys I decided that the only sensible thing to do would be to make a sandwich with all three, and to my great surprise it was actually really tasty! And so, this evening, for the first time in quite a while, I had a cheese, jam and pilchard sandwich, and yes, still scrummy! Took me right back!

The final IOW link for the day stems from our trip to the cinema this afternoon (where we watched Dinner with Schmucks - which gets a mildly amusing three stars from me). We went to the Odeon at Dockside and once we'd got our tickets we had a few minutes to spare and so went into the outlet shops and picked up a few snacks for munching through the movie. One thing that Nicky picked up was a bag of honeycomb, and this got us to talking on the way home about the IOW, partly because I remember getting it on Boulders Leigh holidays, but also because Jake remembered it from a rather marvellous sweet shop that we found in Shanklin a couple of years ago. Anyway, somehow from honeycomb we managed to get onto an idea of Jake and I having a boys' trip to the Island staying in a retro VW camper (available from Isle of Wight Campers). Jake seems keen, and seems like fun to me too!

Wisdom

So September is upon us, bringing with it all of the new term joys. Jake was back at school today, and from what little I've managed to glean so far it sounded like the day went well - top of the heap now in Year 6. One of my main memories from 4th year juniors (to use the old money) was our teacher frequently reminding us that we were due for quite a shock when we moved from being the big fish in the small pond to being the minnows in a rather larger pool. I'll do my best to let Jake enjoy being one of the big kids for a while before I start mentioning it.

I've been back at work since the beginning of the week (ignoring the Bank Holiday) and I'm still struggling to get back into it. I suppose it's the sign of a good holiday, but I'm not really back in the work groove yet - need to get that sorted soon as I've got something of a testing time coming up over the next few weeks and months. My employer doesn't like to make things easy for you if you want to progress to the next stage in your career.

Getting back into the news agenda having managed to ignore all current affairs whilst being on holiday, but back into car commuting territory I can't help but catch the headlines even if I'm on 2 rather than 4. Seems to be lots of politicians in the news but not much politics - Tony has written down that he thought Gordon was weird (there's a surprise - mind you it's the most tempted I've been to actually buy a political memoir, even if it is out perhaps a little too soon - with a bit more time maybe a more rounded view will emerge), brotherly love seems to be stretched a bit thin with David and Ed (both of whom went to the same college as me, but had both been and gone by the time I put in an appearance), and William is defending himself against some dodgy allegations. What to make of it all, I have no idea!

Listening to the songs that appear in between the news summaries, I see that Robbie and Gary have recorded a duet. Couple of things: firstly the guitar at the beginning reminds me a bit of a Chris Rice song (an artist we heard on the radio on holiday in Florida a few years back - the Cartoon Song is just priceless!) and secondly, what do the other three make of it all? Don't you think that they might be a bit pissed off that after all the fuss about the return of the prodigal Robbie, the first release might include all of them, rather than just the talented ones?

Oh yeah, and, happy days, I had a visit to the dentist today. Didn't go according to plan, and I emerged minus a few hundred pounds and minus one wisdom tooth. My face aches!