personal

early years

university

family

spiritualism

leisure

travelogues

The line between leisure activities, hobbies and things I pursue as potential alternative careers is sometimes blurred.  Many of my friends have expressed surprise that I ever find time for what they would call leisure.  I've always believed, and found from personal experience, that when you love doing something then time spent on that activity is always rewarding, whether it fits the traditional notion of a "leisure" activity or not.

Writing

A lot of my free time is taken up with writing, but since I hope that one day this will be a paying activity, in this case I haven't counted it as "leisure."  Most of my "professional" pages cover one form of writing or another.  Please check them out for more details.

TV

Time was that TV pretty much formed the top and bottom of my evening entertainment.  That time was between the ages of 9 and 32.  Before 9 I didn't have an "evening" in which to be entertained: I was in bed.  After 32 I was too busy to be a couch potato for an entire evening, but still watched a couple of hours most days.  But in between, if I wasn't in the pub, eating or sleeping I'd probably be in front of the telly.  Let's face it back then there wasn't a lot else to do.

I remember how excited we were at the "extra choice" offered when BBC2 started broadcasting.  Now with hundreds of channels to choose from, there's even less worth watching than when we were stuck with those three channels.  With so many other calls on my time, I don't watch as much as I used to, but I still catch most episodes of Dalziel & Pascoe; Waking the Dead; Hustle; Doctor Who; Lost; Heroes; Spooks; EE & Corrie; and American Idol.  My Topfield TF5800 PVR has a 250GB capacity and zips through the ad-breaks in no time!

Chat

Despite having been around computers more-or-less non-stop since 1976, and on the net in one way or another since 1991, I didn't start chatting regularly until March 1999.  Once I'd started though, I was pretty much hooked.  For almost two years I could be found on the chat every night, often until 1 or 2am.

I made some good friends there, many of whom I'm still in regular contact with and some I've met, and continue to meet from time to time, in real life.  But the 'draw' of the chat channels has lost its hold on me.  Now I visit once every couple of weeks at the most, often no more than once a month just to keep in touch with the few regulars who still hang out there.

I dabbled with ICQ for a short while, but it was never my favourite format and after a few 'unusual' conversations with total strangers I decided it wasn't worth the bother.  I've kept up with Messenger though, and just recently I've been glad I did because I discovered that both my daughters use it.  So now we can buzz each other whenever we like, instead of having a mega-news-catchup once every two weeks :)

Reading

See box above for latest reading.  Until recently I was never one to have more than one book on the go at once.  Now though I seem to have drifted into the habit.  Imajica is in the glove-box.  It's been there for a couple of years, about two-thirds finished.  It was overtaken by one or other of the Potters and somehow I never got back to it.  Not only that but I've developed a habit of buying books and then never getting round to reading them.  This started around holiday time a couple of years back - buying enough books for a fortnight's reading by the pool and only getting through half of them - but the habit stuck and now I have six or eight unread around the house and I've had to discipline myself not to buy any more until some of them are done. Stop press: I finally finished House Atreides, which had been in danger of becoming another Imajica (although it never found its way into the glove-box).  I might write a critique some time, if I can be arsed.

Reading was probably my earliest passion.  I've been an avid reader since the age of about 4.  When I moved to "big school" - West Bridgford Grammar School (see 'early years') - I was both amazed and delighted to discover they had a small bookshop in the Crush Hall that opened a couple of dinnertimes every week and sold a variety of paperbacks.  I spent many happy hours browsing the small selection of titles and it was from there that I acquired the very first book bought with my own money (1066 And All That - which I was pleased to see still in print after all these years).  I repeated the experience many times over the years until the bookstore was discontinued, and that was how I began my lifelong love of owning books.

Then in March 2006 Nikki and I went along to the inaugural meeting of a Chorlton book club that was to become known as Chorlton Chapters.  Our reasons for joining were varied but principally centred around meeting new people and having an excuse to read something different from the stuff we usually would.  One month in, it looked like it would be a Good Thing and now after a year I can say it's one of the best "joining" experiences I've had.

Beer & Pubs

My love affair with the hop started when I was about 17 and we used to sneak off down to the pub in school lunchtimes every so often (usually end of term days) and slightly more often from discos on Saturday nights.

Drinking never featured very large in my early life.  My Mum is a "glass of sherry at Christmas" kind of woman and my Dad enjoyed a pint with a game of snooker, but apart from that there's no clue where my deep appreciation of all things ale-ish originates (although my uncle...).  Nevertheless it's true to say that drinking has formed the central pillar of my social activities since my University days.

Manchester is a great place to enjoy good beer.  When I first came here it had six local breweries: Robinsons, Boddingtons, Hydes, Holts, Lees and Greenall Whitley.  Of these all but the two unlinked names above are still going strong.  Boddingtons sadly closed in 2005 although the cask ale continues to be brewed at the Hydes plant.  The old online report of the last day at Strangeways has now been taken down. In its place is an article on its conversion to a hotel site.  In a similar vein, after a period of expansion, Greenalls announced their intention to move out of brewing and the last pint was produced around 1991.

My first experience of a beer festival was a day trip to Blackpool with some University mates.  I can't remember exactly how many beers were there - probably around 40 - but I do remember (dimly!) spending some time walking along the beach in an attempt to sober up between the morning and evening sessions.

Nowadays my beer drinking is restricted to pub quiz nights, karaoke sessions, "special" weeks at Wetherspoons and the odd weekend visit back to Nottingham for a heavy session with my mates.  We did have one major highlight in 2005 though, when we attended BOTH days of the ZestQuest Beerfest in Chorlton.  An excellent event with a fine selection of beers and ciders which we fervently hope will become an annual fixture in the Chorlton calendar.  Are you listening, vicar? 8)
Update: He was indeed listening!  Since that first event, the Chorlton Beer Fest has become a regular event.  Although the beer festival web pages seem to come and go during the year, nearer the time there should be an active link from the main St. Clement's website.  Cheers!

Singing

Since I let the word "karaoke" slip into the previous section I might as well come clean and admit that I do enjoy singing.  I first plucked up the courage to get off my ass on holiday in 2001 and since then it's been a task to shut me up.  I've even recorded an album, details of which can be found on my 'professional' pages (although I should admit right away that I am nowhere near being a professional singer - just a reasonable amateur).

For about a year we had a darned good karaoke DJ at our local, only 200 yards down the road.  Sadly he gave it up after a falling out with the management, and shortly after that the pub changed hands.  The new landlord was, shall we say, not enamoured with the idea of karaoke (even though it had been by far the most popular night of the week when Owen DJ'ed).  For a brief period in 2005 we thought the tide had turned when the landlord was persuaded (mostly by increased Sunday night competition from rival pubs with karaoke sessions) that it might be a good idea to bring it back, but it was a damp squib.  His attempts to find a decent DJ came to nought (that is to say, he found a DJ but he wasn't decent) and we gave up going.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel when Nikki got a new job and discovered one of her colleagues puts on a karaoke show with her partner every Friday and Saturday.  It's a little bit further than a 200-yard stroll to the corner (Heywood, in fact) but it's a cracking night and a great crowd of regulars.

Best moment: Doing "Unchained Melody" in Caleta de Fuste, Fuerteventura, and a packed bar of about 150 people bursting into spontaneous applause as I hit the high note.

Food

My love affair with food is even more well established than my relatively brief fling with beer, but even so things didn't really take off until I left home.  My Mum, bless her, didn't really discover 'alternative' cuisine until I started cooking at Uni and bringing the dishes back home in the vacations to demonstrate my culinary skills.  Up until then she was what you might call a traditional English family cook: all meat and two veg; bangers and mash; and cauliflower cheese, although she did experiment with a pressure cooker at one time.  That was a memorable occasion.  She refused to believe that a cauliflower could possibly be properly cooked in two minutes, so she decided to leave it in the pressure cooker for a little longer.  For fifteen of your Earth minutes, to be precise.  Can I say cauliflower soup?  The really impressive thing was how it looked as though it was still in one piece when she took the lid off.  Until she tried to lift it out.

The Plaza Café. Thanks to David
Henderson for sharing the pic.

So my first experience of 'alternative cuisine' was a couple of weeks into my tenure at UMIST when some mates suggested stopping off at the Plaza Café for a curry on the way back to Owens Park.  People rarely say "go for a curry" these days, have you noticed?  It's always "go for an Indian" now.  I suppose that's to differentiate it from Thai curry, or any other kind.  Back then, we went for a curry.  And the Plaza was where we went more often than not.  As far as I remember they only had one kind: Chicken Biryani.  Or at least, that was the only kind anyone ordered.  At first it came with only four varieties of sauce: Mild, Medium, Hot and Killer.  Woe betide anyone who ordered either of the first two strengths, for they would be forever branded a wimp.  So it was Hot for me that first time, and I suffered the inevitable consequences.  My tolerance increased rapidly and I soon graduated to Killer, but by that time the macho types had decided Killer wasn't hot enough for their manly palates.  They demanded Adam (the proprietor, who most customers insisted on calling "Charlie" for some unfathomable reason) create a sauce so hot that it was worthy of their consideration.  Thus was "Suicide" sauce born.  I remember being at the Plaza one night when someone was challenged to drink down a bowl of Suicide sauce in one draught.  He accomplished this feat to the loud cheers of his mates, but was strangely absent from lectures the next day.  And the day after that.  Rumour had it that he had been admitted to hospital, having stripped the lining off his stomach.  But that, of course, may be apocryphal.  What I do know is that was the day I tired of the constant oneupmanship on sauce strength.  I asked Adam what his preferred sauce was.  "I like to taste my food," he replied, "I never eat anything hotter than Hot."  From that day on, Hot was the sauce for me.  Sadly the Plaza is no more, although I'm sure it lives on in the memories of its many one-time regulars.

I could continue on this subject for several pages.  Let's just say that since I first set foot in the Plaza all those years ago I've not looked back.  And I've never had cauliflower soup.

Movies

My first memory of cinema is being taken to see "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" for a friend's birthday.  Must have been about 1964.  BBC2 started up around that time and I soon became a firm fan of films through watching the Saturday afternoon westerns and classics from the 40s and 50s with my Mum (who had seen them at the 'flicks' on their first release).  I still remember being impressed that she seemed to know the names of all the actors.  Ten years later the first film I saw under my own steam was The Towering Inferno and I even managed to sneak off to the cinema when I spent a night in Cambridge (for an abortive interview to read Medicine at Emmanuel College) to see The Devils with Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave.

There are very few movies I've seen that I haven't been able to get something from, but if I was asked to list my all-time top ten then it would look something like this (in no particular order):

...although there's at least another ten that I could include and the list would probably change weekly depending what mood I was in!

Music

I entered my teens just as the 60s were ending, so I missed the golden age of the Beatles, Kinks, etc, in that I was never able to go to see them play live.  But their music still had an effect on me as I sang their songs on the walk home from school.  I begged long and hard for a reel-to-reel tape recorder for my birthday so I could record stuff off the radio (Pick of the Pops, or 2-way Family Favourites).  Eventually I was rewarded with a Philips model, one of the ones with "magic eye" automatic recording levels.  The quality was appalling of course - I had no way of making direct recordings so I simply stood the little plastic microphone next to the radio and made frantic shushing gestures at anyone who walked into the room while I was taping.  On top of that, any sudden really loud passages in the music would cause the "magic eye" to massively overcompensate, resulting in an extremely quiet interlude in the recording while the levels recovered.  Even with these limitations I still had a lot of fun with it, and well remember my first recording: Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World."

I started working at C&A on Saturdays on 24th February 1973 and the first thing I saved for was something to play music on.  I should take some time out here to explain to our younger readers the concept of "saving for" something.  It's what we had to do in the days before ubiquitous credit.  You picked up your wages, took a chunk of it, and put it away somewhere like a bank account or a tin box.  You repeated this process every week until you had enough to buy what you wanted.  Since my wage for eight hours selling suits and trousers was £3.60, it took a while before I'd saved enough to finally get my hands on a stereo system.  For about a year I studied the hi-fi magazines and hung around Nottingham's music stores selecting the separates I wanted.  Eventually with University looming and unable to come to a satisfactory agreement with my parents about where the system would be installed, I decided to go for a portable unit: the Sanyo "briefcase" Music Centre, model G2615N.

Sanyo Music Centre G2615N

Mine for the princely sum of £84.92 (applying the RPI would make this £690.93 at 2004 prices), it included a three-speed record deck with ceramic pick-up, cassette recorder with microphone and LW/MW/FM radio all packaged in a briefcase-style case with a hinged lid in two sections that lifted off to become a pair of speakers with fetching petrol-blue grilles.  I bought it from Lind-Air in the city centre on January 17, 1974 and I thought it was the nuts.  Bought my first two albums that day too: the soundtrack from 2001:A Space Odyssey; and (*wince*) Gilbert O'Sullivan's 'Himself'.  But what made it so special for me, after years of taping stuff off the radio, was that it was all integrated.  I could record direct from the turntable or radio!  A giant leap for mankind.  It worked off mains or batteries too, so was truly portable (although I don't remember ever using it with batteries).

And so my vinyl album collection started, and continued to increase slowly over the next ten years.  Later in 1974 (June 19 to be precise) I saw my first live concert - Stomu Yamash'ta's East Wind at Nottingham University Students' Union.  It soon became a regular venue for us, and over the next two years I saw Renaissance, Caravan, Barclay James Harvest and many more bands there, as well as Greenslade and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band at the Nottingham Albert Hall.

My love of live music continued throughout my brief studentship in Manchester, especially in my second year when I was elected Socials Secretary at UMIST - much to the eventual consternation of the Treasurer.  The passing of the years has not dimmed the enjoyment.  Recently we were lucky enough to see the live version of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds at the MEN Arena.

Vinyl gave way to CD for me in 1984 when I refreshed the separates system I'd been given for my 21st birthday with a more up-to-date setup including Mission CD player.  Nowadays I don't even play the CDs, except in the car: I've ripped them all to my PC.

Chorlton Players

Amateur dramatics has never been my bag, but after moving back to Manchester we got to know several people who are members of the Chorlton Players and eventually were persuaded to join in 2005.  Purely to help out FoH and making tea, you understand ;o)  Oh, and I've been taking the photos for their publicity material too.

Bowling

I started ten-pin bowling while studying for my 'A' Levels, and soon after starting at UMIST I found a like-minded group of individuals who were quite happy to go bowling on Wednesday afternoons, which were notionally set aside for "sport."  I've been playing on and off ever since, with varying degrees of regularity.  There have been peaks of activity (a short burst of lunchtime playing from work for a year or so; the post-divorce period before buying a house when bowling was one of the few things I could do to spend time with my daughters) and troughs (like now), but it's always been something I enjoy and am happy to do at the drop of a hat.  Not that I've ever been particularly good at it - with an all time high score of 180-something and an average of about 140-150 I was never league material - but it's fun nevertheless.  Best moment: the day I got my own ball, took it onto the lanes for the first time and got five strikes with my first five rolls.