Personal – Page 30 – Fooyah

March 23 2021March 23 2021

The Homeland

In 1996 I did something I had never thought I would do at any point before. I moved to live south of the river. I grew up in Essex and went I went to university I lived in Knightsbridge, Fulham, Earl’s Court and Ealing. None of those places were south of the river Thames and I rarely went there. I always considered the south to be full of poorly maintained roads and areas less nice than I was used to. When I eventually got a teaching job I was happy but also somewhat full of trepidation as I had a job in Kent and I was not going to travel across the Dartford Crossing every day. So, I moved to live in Gillingham. A Medway town. A working class town full of history and pride. I’m trying to think of a nice building in Gillingham and to be honest I’m struggling. The whole area of Medway had really struggled since the closing of the dockyard in the 80s.

I lived in Gillingham for three years before a short dalliance back in Essex when I taught at a school in Brentwood which has since closed. Then I came back to Kent. I’ve been here since living in Rainham, Maidstone and now the village of Eccles. I quite like it down here. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that “home area” feeling you get when you are a kid and I also know that I don’t have that feeling when I return to the village in Essex where I grew up. I wonder if that ever returns. I think I still feel a little like an imposter. But then I’m not sure what feelings I am seeking.

How long do you have to be somewhere before you feel “at home”. I do love my little house and I really enjoy the scenery around my house but I don’t often feel “at home”. Maybe adult life is always about feeling transitory. I’ve been involved with the community so I don’t think it’s that. In the past I’ve been a trustee of a local charity and I’m currently involved with the cadets. Maybe we all feel a little lost sometimes?

The photograph I above is from Queenborough on the Isle Of Sheppey. There’s a small lump in the middle distance and that is Grain Tower Battery – a war defence platform. Then, behind that you can see the skyline of Southend. A famous coastal town in Essex. I’ve been there and I can sometimes see Southend when I go for a run. I look at it almost wistfully but also in the knowledge that I’ve only been there a few times as a person older than ten years old and have no anchorage there.

March 20 2021March 20 2021

Mid March Already

This whole lockdown thing has really messed up my internal calendar. There are times when I think it’s coming up to autumn and other times when it could be May? I have to keep looking at an electronic device to make sure I know what month it is. But then again, a bit like when we change the clocks, I’m never really sure I trust the programming on any devices until I can check with a third party official source [normally the radio].

I’ve had a mostly administration day. I’ve looked at updating computers and making sure things work properly along with setting up various cloud storage devices. It’s one of those jobs that needs doing every now and then. It’s almost fun. Also, for some reason a few of my albums within iTunes were labelled as compilations and that put them somewhere strange in the music app on my phone so I’ve been doing some admin making sure they are all correctly organised and labelled.

Friday night I didn’t fall asleep at 2000 so that was nice, being able to watch a television show all the way through!

Well, I’m sure other important stuff happened this week but I have no recollection.

March 14 2021March 14 2021

Not Sure Why – Just Do

I had a realisation a few weeks ago that I really missed wearing odd clothes and makeup. I was watching the series Umbrella Academy and the character Klaus was wearing a skirt and I thought – I want one, I want to be at a place where I can wear one. Smith and I have travelled to Germany every summer for the last few years and we’ve planned costumes and things long beforehand. There are small gigs we used to go to where people are more free to express their wants and delights, in terms of clothing and look, than they are in the dreary offices where they work. None of these things has happened for over a year now and I think a part of me is missing.

Back when I was young, and that’s quite a while ago now, there was the first ever Red Nose Day. I was in school and I want to say I was in something like the fourth or fifth year. I will check in a moment to see when it actually happened. Now I don’t recall why I decided this but I chose to wear eye shadow and paint my nails when I went to school. We must have had a non-uniform day. Why I chose to do the makeup thing I honestly have no idea. What I do remember is liking the feeling that I looked slightly different and I also liked the look of my painted nails, I think I felt more “me”. [Just looked up when the first comic relief was and it turns out to be 1988, so I was in the fifth year].

There are some later events which made me think about the whole makeup thing a little more. I dressed in drag at a show performed by cadets at RAF Coningsby in the summer of 1988 and I had some makeup on. I remember the eyeliner didn’t really wash off easily and I got some funny looks in the JRM the next morning. I can remember going out to pubs in Bishop’s Stortford in my late teens and early twenties when I was already wearing eyeliner [badly I would say because I am terrible at putting it on]. Most of my friends were just accepting and didn’t care. Which was nice. I enjoyed wearing this stuff and as much as I didn’t have these terms I do think I felt more me when doing that.

Skip forward a long way and the rediscovery of wearing makeup occurs with attendance at the M’era Luna festival and going to Club AC a couple of times. The smaller gigs that Smith and I have attended also help as many dress up and a lot of the time the gigs run into the Slimelight club. I went through a phase of wearing nail varnish each week and while I stopped that while my kids grow up and go through school it is something I think I will return to. I just like it. One of my favourite things is when Smith and I are in the Eurotunnel waiting to get to the continent and I put on my black nail varnish. It feels like coming home once that stuff is on. Yes, I know that psychologically it’s linked to being “out” or seeing bands or having a great weekend away at a festival but I think I genuinely do miss wearing it and would like to wear it all the time.

Fancy Dress For Fun But Wanting To do It All The Time

So, I love the look and feel of makeup, I really feel at home surrounded by freaks and geeks when at a gig or festival. Walking up the stairs at Electrowerkz and entering the main venue to the sights and sounds of a gig and people just being who they are and accepting it – this feels like home and there’s a calmness that descends on me, a feeling of belonging. We are all people of contrast and the flip side to me is that I also really enjoy being part of something super restrictive about clothing and rules – RAFAC. I can dress up in uniform and I do it well, I do it to look smart and I do it to show the dedication I have to the organisation. I can spend time away on RAF bases or spend time at the RAF Club and still feel at home. So, I suppose part of me is constantly rebelling and trying to be subversive while another part of me loves being in the establishment. Perhaps I secretly like the feeling of being in the establishment but also having that other rebellious part to me. I’m quite open about how I dress and my outfits. I think it takes a few people by surprise and some just write it off as “dress up” but I honestly feel as though it’s more than that. It’s a part of me.

I am fortunate to live in a time when most people don’t care about these things. I am lucky to be able to live in a society where you can dress like this and attend your events and most people aren’t that worried about it. There are social rules that are broadly tolerant. It must be very difficult to want to dress up or wear make up or do things that are considered subversive by the country’s leaders and you don’t have the freedom to be what you are. It is such a shame that some people will judge and be disapproving, unaccepting, scared or even violent towards those who are different. I imagine the newspapers and societal need for shaming others for their behaviour when I remember the sort of thing where “MP caught wearing women’s clothes” or kink shaming would regularly make the headlines and there would be scandal. I don’t think that society has moved on from that particularly. People’s lives are judged by a set of rules which don’t fit all. Imagine a cabinet member being discovered to live within a threesome. A lot of people would lose their shit. For me the question would be – are they all consenting and are they all happy? If that was the case then I care not. It feels that society expects its leaders and people of prominence to behave like the “perfect ideal”, which doesn’t exist, but we grow up hearing so much about mum+dad+family that a lot of people struggle to be accepting of anything else.

Just think about the hoo-hah that occurs when a Hollywood celeb announces that their sexuality is not hetero. We have lots of news articles and the world seems to be up in arms for a short while. Many people seem obsessed with who puts what body part into whom and where. I would hope that one day we reach the point where you don’t have to “come out” because no-one gives a shit. You be as you want to be and we don’t care. That is a place I would like to live.

March 13 2021March 13 2021

That Was A Week, That Was

Absolutely bloody shattered. That’s how I ended this week. Last night, Friday, I ate food and then tried to watch a film. Fell asleep at 2000 on the sofa and then went to bed at 2230 when I woke up. I’ve not even really had the hardest of jobs in the organisation. There are others who are running the testing centre and track and trace and all that and all I have to do is our core business of teaching. Knackering. But also nice to be able to see faces again. Kinda.

I bought a new cafetiere and it came with a coffee grinder so I’ve been grinding coffee beans and testing that type of coffee out. It’s fun, I guess, but not sure if it’s worth it. Especially as I bastardise my coffee with sugar and milk. I then decided to get a filter coffee machine instead of a new kettle. My kettle looks worn out but a bit of descaling has meant it still works fine so I can live with it for a while longer. The coffee machine has a timer and so I can set everything ready in the evening and come down to fresh coffee when I wake up every work day. I will say that having everything done when I walk through the kitchen is a sheer delight.

My home boiler, hot water and heating, has issues and I can’t let the heating work automatically. This has been like this for two months now. I pay money for a boiler fixing service and my initial appointment was to be about four weeks after I initially called them, and while that seemed a long time to me I had to remind myself this is Covid and my system still works to an extent. Then they cancelled that appointment because – reasons and pushed it back to mid March. Now the service company have cancelled that and pushed it to beginning of April. I will have been waiting approximately four months for something to be fixed with a house that is mostly cold. This isn’t the sort of service I pay for. Screw them.

I got a new mobile phone a while back and while it’s the same brand as I normally get it still feels new. Which is nice. Normally I get a new phone, you transfer all your data and you look at it and go “Oh, works the same then” which is exactly what you expect when devices run the same OS. This one feels and looks different somehow and that’s even after one month of owning it! Oh, I also upgraded my sim only contract and now I have 160GB of data a month. I use around 5GB. So, I’m going to have to see if I can max this out. Time to start downloading films and streaming lots of video. There was only one time in my past when I think I went over my data allowance and that was at Linton when I was trying to stream an F1 race.

I also had a bad headache this week and woke at 0200 in pain and not able to get back to sleep. I had to get up and take pills in the night, which I can’t remember ever having to do in the past. Fortunately the pain had gone by the morning and I was able to head in to work. But trying to sleep and having thoughts running through about how to organise work and cadets when you aren’t going to be there is not nice. I think I need to change one of my life rules. If I think I might take some tablets then I should take them there and then. Don’t wait to see if it gets better. Just get those drugs into my system. I have a similar successful rule about work. If I think I’m not sure I can make it to work because I feel ill then that is when you don’t go in to work. That particular rule doesn’t always work because there are other social pressures when working in my sector.

Minecraft Bedrock ran an update which also included a server update so it was a nice distraction to put the updated server on my PC. It’s not a hard job but there’s a list of things that need to be done correctly to make sure everything works properly. Which it does and so I got a nice sense of satisfaction from that. I did have a small panic when the ray tracing didn’t seem to work on the PC but it did after a short wait and so thankfully I don’t have to investigate why. I quite enjoy fixing PC things but sometimes the time involved can be quite high. Things are generally fixed either within fifteen minutes or three hours.

I hate selling stuff on eBay. I recently went through a cupboard and found some old tech items and thought I would either throw them away or sell them. So, I decided to sell them on eBay. I wasn’t sure how much I’d get but it seemed more responsible than just chucking them out. Once tech items sell I’m always worried they decided to stop working in transit and arrive broken. I would never knowingly sell something that doesn’t work [unless I labelled that clearly]. So, once things are posted I have a week of background stress until I get my positive feedback. One item I sold I accidentally labelled it as the wrong model and so that is coming back to me which is perfectly fair because that’s my mistake. I’m happy to correct that. The other item the buyer wanted to return because “it didn’t work”. Now, he had already messaged me asking for the software download and how to get the item working. This indicated to me that he didn’t understand the tech side of things. Then he wanted to return it saying it didn’t work. I messaged him asking if he had followed a detailed list of steps to get it working on his system and I haven’t heard back at all. I suspect he was hoping it was plug and play and I also suspect he was connecting it directly to his PC and not to his router. There are many things it could be and I’m not his personal tech support. So his request to return was denied.

Time to get out for a run and burn off the calories of my take-out last night.

March 6 2021March 6 2021

The Good, The Bad and The Whoops!

Below I have arranged some screenshots from me playing X-Plane. I’m not really going to give any commentary. I should be writing a summary of this week of lockdown here but I genuinely am not sure what I can say without breaking my own website rules.

February 28 2021February 28 2021

Exploring The Curves

I headed out in the glorious sun yesterday afternoon for a bike ride. My intention was to not climb any hills which limits the routes I can take given that the village is almost at river level – although I’m not at future risk of future flooding due to sea level rise unlike most of the new houses being built on flood plains in this country. I decided to investigate a riverside path which looked iffy. The were definitely marsh conditions but it is the other-side of the river to my normal running routes. I didn’t know how far I was going to go but I headed out to Brooklands Lake and found my way from there.

The footpath would have been better on foot. There were times when I had to get off the bike to avoid diving into the river and also a number of trees over which I had to decided either to climb over or go under. I felt like I was exploring and it was good fun. I may have ended up with bleeding legs and hands from the thorns but I didn’t care. Along the way I found three pillboxes built in the second world war much like the one along the Medway from last year.

The first pillbox was a surprise to me as I’d never been that way before and now I’m tempted to chronicle all along the lower Medway – even though that’s been done on other pages. Holborough Marshes was a surprisingly nice place with the sounds of running water and a lovely calmness. Apart from the motorbike racing up and down behind the river defences. I’m never sure what I think about bikers off roading around the villages. Part of me gets annoyed as they shouldn’t be doing it, but the other side of me thinks that as long as they are out of people’s way then it’s up to them. I guess the overarching societal decision is they are wrong and should go to specific places to enjoy their sport, there are tracks around here where they could go. It’s like those wankers who dump rubbish in places around our gorgeous countryside, they don’t think the rules apply to them or they don’t want to pay for the proper disposal.

This one at Brooklands Lake was rather a surprise and I didn’t expect to find anymore pillboxes as I travelled further up the Medway towards Allington. I apologise that the photographs aren’t that great but I have two excuses. Firstly I’m using a new camera app and getting used to how it works and secondly, I had polarising sunglasses on [which I didn’t remove] and that messes with what I can see on the screen.

This pillbox was in quite a nice position with some open ground towards the river. I remember thinking it would be a nice picnic spot. There were other spots which were quite nice but I saw the remains of around two tents and some air mattresses and the usual human detritus. This was a shame as it ruined the area. I do think sometimes that I should become a litter picker and collect this trash but time is the limiting factor there.

Overall this was a lovely cycling route, thorns excluded and somewhere I think I could run possibly one day if I can get my distances up to 18km or so. I’ve recently been running around 15km and found it quite good although my feet hurt. I’m going to try some new inserts in my trainers.

February 26 2021February 26 2021

Somehow Not The Same

Until recently I owned a Bodum Cafetière and it worked fine. I mean it’s just a French Press coffee maker and there’s not a lot that it could do wrong. As an aside I just went over to the Bodum website to see if I could grab a picture of what the cafetière looked like and it turns out there are far more variations on these devices than I thought possible, what a rabbit hole! Then one day while washing the cafetière the glass cracked. I’m not sure how and I didn’t hear anything but it broke. Now, I like my morning coffee and so I wanted to get another French press as soon as I could.

Imagine me now walking down the “home stuff” aisle in Sainsbury’s and I spot a cafetière. It’s not made by Bodum and is branded as Sainsbury’s. Should be OK I tell myself, there’s not a lot you can do wrong with a device like this, and if I’m being honest they seem far more expensive than need be. So, I bought the Sainsbury’s cafetière.

That turns out to have been a mistake. Apparently not all French presses are the same. With this new one there is no way to remove the glass from the surround and so I can’t clean the outside of the glass properly. The gaps between the surround and the glass mean that stuff gets in-between and looks horrible from the inside of the cafetière. I guess that’s liveable with but then the bigger issue is that the lid design has less rim and does not align well so when pouring the coffee it regularly spills down the side of the cafetière and ends up on the kitchen counter.

When this leakage of the nectar first occurred I could hear something in the recesses of my brain from before, when I owned a not-Bodum and it just wasn’t as good. I had flashbacks to another time thinking that I should have spent the extra on the Bodum because the one I bought at half the price was shit.

So, the moral is sometimes the better brands are better.

Oh, and I ‘m still searching for a decent can opener. The latest one works, as in it opens cans, but I’ve got cuts on my fingers because it uses the outside of the rim rather than the safer inside part. Ho hum.

February 23 2021February 23 2021

Somewhere Else

It’s almost a year since I went somewhere else. If I look back over my journeys since March 2020 I can recall visiting my parents twice, I think in the summer when we were allowed to visit people in gardens. I went to the white cliffs at Dover in early September I think. I had a walk along the river Medway sometime recently. And that is it. I’ve not been to anywhere vaguely military for a year. I’ve not seen friends and colleagues for about a year. I did return to work Sept through to Dec and saw those people then and it was nice. But I haven’t been somewhere else for a long time. All of a sudden I am very aware this is a modern world problem and that I am quite lucky in reality. No-one I know has died from this virus and I have a home which is somewhere palatable to be. There are plenty out there who have no idea how to feed their families or how to keep a roof over their head.

I am looking forward to being somewhere else. Just to experience other things. The mental aspects of constantly doing the same things and not being able to improve or learn new things has taken a toll. I guess I’ve been doing gaming videos in a bad way over on my YouTube channel and that was quite fun but not the same as actually being outside somewhere else. I haven’t used my camera for quite a while and I think I should. Maybe I need to start doing still life compositions? I don’t know. I guess I could do some sort of project to make sure my camera still works!

I’m not sure that the current moves by the government are the right ones. I’m not in charge and I’m sure they’ve got their reasons I just don’t think public health is at the top of their list. I also worry about the ability of these people to absorb technical and nuanced information about the ‘rona and how it affects us all. The covid recovery group are cunts. I guess we always knew there were a lot in that party but this group have clearly defined themselves as such.

I’m going somewhere else today. I’m looking forward to seeing other things. But I also know from the other times I have been to this “somewhere else” that after about thirty minutes it feels normal. I’m actually looking forward to being somewhere with jet noise and the smell of fuel. Hopefully that will happen later this year.