So, what have I been? Some of you will know.. others won’t, some won’t even care.. Way back around November time I started noticing (and so did other people) things about me, that just didn’t seem, right.

My speech was becoming slurred, my memory was getting really bad, and I was having real issues concentrating, and generally communicating. Being me, I tried to shrug these things off, and it was only after a trip away in February when my wife physically couldn’t wake me up one morning, and my left arm was extremely stiff and painful to raise up, we agreed it was time to get someone to have a look at me. Here started a long journey, and one that is still going on, and may go on for some time.

Obviously the urgency was to check for all the horrible stuff that you just always hope and pray isn’t going to happen to you, things like strokes, and brain tumours. This was quite a frightening time, because, you just don’t know.

I had MRI scans, unfortunately having your head stuck in a magnetron for a long period while they scan your brain for what they called ‘organic anomalies’  doesn’t give you any special powers, and it’s not an overly pleasant experience. The only upside really being that within a few weeks of poking, scanning, prodding and attaching to various gizmo’s, the consultants managed to rule out the two most terrifying things that might be wrong with me, and thankfully, this meant I wasn’t likely to leave this mortal earth ahead of my time (phew!)

Next, more tests.. possibly one of the strangest was when I was hooked up all night to a monitoring machine to measure my blood oxygen levels and heart rate (amongst other things!). I did feel a little like I was on a day trip to Kabul, and it was quite worrying at 11pm at night when the unit went ‘BEEEEEP’, lit up like a Christmas tree as it armed itself automatically.. Feeling a little like the bloke out of ‘24′ . Laying almost motionless in bed, my finger glowed red all night from the blood oxygen monitor, the cats chasing my finger if I moved a muscle.

I’ll spare you the various poking and prodding that went on for the next few months, and through all this I kept having to look on the positive side that there was nothing nasty in my head which had it in for me.

So the upshot of all this is that I’m still having great difficulties, and I’m still not back to myself, in fact, I’m still on long term sick leave. My speech can, on days be awful, and I’m sorry but I WILL forget things you tell me, or ask me to do, and if I stop mid sentence, have slurred speech or use the wrong words, I’m not drunk, I’m just having issues…

Why am I telling you this…? Well, mainly because I do want you to know I’m still here, I’ve not vanished, and I’m starting to find writing a bit therapeutic.. I also do want to start catching up on all the wonderful things that, despite the last eight months, have been good, and should be recorded for future reading..

I’ve written on and off for years, a short idea of snippet here and there, and actually having a book published is something I’ve always wanted to do. Nanowrimo was actually very useful. I completed the 50,000 words, although it was mainly just random ideas and thinking, plots, and thoughts, enough to at least start working from, a few people have read snippets of some of the more formulated stuff, and so I thought I’d put one snippet up and see if anything came back:

History had one major disadvantage, it was old. Not that old wasn’t good, it was more the fact that being old, things aren’t quite so clear. It’s like your granny who gets to that certain age when things aren’t quite recalled as clearly as they once were. Its those moments when she tends to forget who you are, why you’re coming to see her, and why you seem bothered that a total stranger cannot remember your name, after all, what are you expecting her to be, some sort of mind reader? Turning up at the home of an old lady and expecting her to guess your name like you were her son or something. History is, the slam of the door of a lady that quite clearly doesn’t know you, and better still doesn’t want you on her doorstep playing some guessing game of ‘what’s my name grandma’ like she was some turn of the century mind reading act from the west end. History, quite often forgot, got a bit confused and wet itself in it’s old age.. This is how New Ears Day came about..

Somewhere though history, the exact reason why people donned large comedy plastic ears and ran around shouting ‘Happy New Ears’ on the first day of the first month has been lost, or, if not lost, slightly misplaced. It was the ministry that ensured that nothing ever was lost, or if it was, it was replaced by something just as good, if not better that took your mind off the fact that you’d just lost something important because you suddenly had something much more exciting, supplied by the ministry of unlost items. In fact he had once misplaced a rather grubby, well, he forgot exactly what was grubby and misplaced, as upon a ministry visit, he found his shiny new sugar spoon (minus the bowl), which, he was sure was the item that he’d misplaced in the first place. At some point the exact reason of whatever the thing was that was to be done on the first day of the first month had been replaced with something better by the ministry of unlost items, possibly due to people losing interest in the original event, of course the utter strangeness of plastic ears didn’t matter to the ministry, since it was a tick in the box, of ‘item found/replaced/customer didn’t notice the loss’ on the annual audit.

The brief I set myself for NanoWriMo was “Things are a miss with the world, quite literally, the odd woolen sock isn’t just getting lost in the wash any more, whole flocks of sheep are going AWOL.. Where all the stuff going? Why does a hypnotic cat look rather sheepish and who misplaced sanity..?” Of course reserving the right to completely change that at any point depending on humor content and potential writing abilities!!

A few people have likened the stuff I’ve written so far to a number of other authors (which I’m assuming is a good thing!), and I know reading some of their work has rubbed off a little bit during my life! So the question is where next, I have a few chapters ‘written’ although still in quite a random state, the story is still morphing and developing, and the Sugar Bowl, and the hypnotic cat are very important…

..I’d be interested in your thoughts…

I often sit back and use off the wall things to work out whats happening, and to get ideas.. I’ve not really written here for some time, and I miss being able to record my thoughts and ideas.. I had a play with Wordle over lunch today to look at what I have talked about here.. and see if that gave me any ideas on where to go with what I’ll write in 2010..

In 2009, so much happened.. I’ll probably add a new post on that at some point and do some general catching up.. but looking at the wordle above for my site.. I guess its pointing towards writing!!

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1 and the goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

so if nothing else… I hope to generate some ideas for “that book thats in all of us”.. if you want to follow my progress.. you can watch at my NaNoWriMo page

Instead we did a family party, I couldn’t get any contact lenses in time so I dug out the make-up for the old man again (I did this for a 80’s party as well a while back).

The make-up this time took a lot less time, given that I’d done it before, but I did add some beard material, which rather than a single stick on beard, was in fact, individual fibres of grey hair, all loveingly stuck onto my face by hand.

Michelle also dug out her costume from last years halloween party, they completely covered up our tans from the honeymoon, and quite a few of our relatives didn’t recognise me, but it was good fun.

We cruised up the Thames at Reading for a few hours, enjoying a fantastic meal and drinks with friends.

The boat only takes approximately 12-15, so our small group had it exclusively.

After dinner we stood up on deck listening to music as we cruised down the river..

The ‘Candlelight‘ is a lovely boat, and something we’d definitely look at doing again, and is also extremely cheap when you have a number of people going.. They also do a curry dinner cruise!!!

It was also nice to see friends just before the big day…

Again all photos on my flickr set..

We are featured in an article about Spice the society and activities group…

For the non keen of eye… that’s me and Michelle in the bottom left of the article.. It’s a fantastic group, and whatever it is you want to do.. from the simple to and just plain out of this world crazy.. They’ll probably do it…

The best events for us have been the weekends away.. The Halloween Ball at Clearwell Caves, or Invading Center Parcs.. If you do a search on the blog you’ll find my previous posts about these.. But their list of events cover everything from walks, special access to Stonehenge, Tank driving, sports, dinners, helicopter training, you name it.. they probably do it.. They also run the club UK wide.. so even if your not in the Thames Valley and Solent area, and you want to get a life… they can point you in the right direction..

You can click here for a full size image of the article..

Despite the forecast of rain.. the day was scorchingly hot and sunny.

Playing the tribute list were Bob Marley, The Gee Bees, T-Rex, Abba and Earth, Wind, and Fire.

We always love marvellous, its a great day out, and we get to spend the day with friends, drink wine and eat.. and you can’t get much better than that really!!!

It seems like not that long ago that I was rushing back from London to get to Marvellous 2007 , how time flies!!!

I took a few photos.. and ‘edited’ some as well…

We had a slight hang over this morning..

In the last few weeks we’ve be up to Scotland for a break..

We managed to get a small cabin on the shore of Loch Awe near Dalmally about 2 hours north of Glasgow and about 45 minutes from the nearest bit of civilisation, a small village shop.

It was a fantastic week, even with the midges, and please if anyone says ‘mind the midges’ if you go to the western side of Scotland, don’t think they are joking.. The place is full of them.. Not rain, shine, wind or flame thrower will send them packing!

We did spend a lot of our time in the lodge as the weather wasn’t wonderful, but it was a good time to get on with some magic books, kick back, and relax.

We did wander out to Loch Ness about another 2 hours north. The scenery on the way up was just breath takingly dynamic. It was, between the rain, a great chance for photos, especially some good sky and cloud shots at Loch Ness.

Loch ness itself I guess needs no introduction, except we saw no monsters, no midges either strangley. Loch ness itself I knew was big, however I didn’t quite realise exactly how big.. If Loch Ness was emptied, it would cover the UK in 6 inches of water from end to end, there is also not enough water in the uk to refill it..

The last day we spent in Glasgow and I took the opportunity to visit Tam Shepards magic shop on Queen Street, owned by the legendary Roy Walton, we had a great chat, and he was kind enough to sign two copies of the complete Walton (volumes one an two)

We returned home to our ‘under construction’ bathroom and a comfy bed..

We had the opportunity to get tickets for Delirium at The O2 for last night, so we jumped at the chance, especially as this was the retirement of the two year run of Cirques first Arena based show.

I’d read a few things about the show before heading up to London, and understood that it was ‘different’ to Cirques normal performances.

We had drinks and food at Raan at the O2, which was really fabulous, and then we managed to head into the O2 VIP lounge. The lounge was great, with only a few people in there, no queues, it’s own bar, comfy chairs and room to breathe, we left the queues behind and enjoyed some pre-show drinks before heading up in the private lift to the 4th floor.

The O2 is a 20,000 seater arena, and the setup for the show divided the space basically in half. giving around a 10,000 seat performance. A pretty huge number for anything except a concert.

Delirium is Cirques first foray into the Arena performance space, and to be honest, it’s got it’s draw backs. The show is, if you sat in the right place, a spectacular show of music, light, projection, multi-media and performance. However from the wrong seats, you’re watching something that could become confusing, long, disjointed and a disappointment.

The stage incorporates 540 feet of projection surfaces, the equivalent of four IMAX screens, allowing massive multimedia videos to be projected onto the screens. The main stage also incorporates a massive semi transparent fly-screen that can slide across the stage to allow projections to be show in front of the performers on stage. This allows some very impressive hologram type effects to be shown on the stage. The visual experience of seeing a 120 foot high woman interacting with the performers on stage is or could be quite breathtaking. I also enjoyed the section at the beginning with the 120 odd foot tall doors that opened and closed with similar sized faces peering out into the audience.

I say, could be quite breathtaking, because I feel that Cirque really failed to make the show what it could be. Yes the show is clever, and large scale, but to be honest I think The O2 was too big for the show. In other cities, the custom stage is viewed from both sides, with the audience sat behind, and in front of the flat stage, pulling them to a more central viewpoint, and creating more of a connection with the performance. With the O2 performance, the audience (all 10,000 of them) were seating in front of the stage only. With a stage that is also quite narrow (for the audience size) it means that a lot of the angles don’t work, particularly some of the fly-screen projections that interact with the performers.

Cirque shows are normally a perfectly balanced mixture of music, singing, acrobatics and on stage performance. Delirium concentrates more on the music, containing music, and remixed music from the last 20 years of Cirque shows, many with an additional vocal section laid over the top. This is the closest you’ll probably get to a Cirque Du Soleil rock concert. However the issue is that Cirque isn’t a rock band, it’s not a super group, and it doesn’t pull off the job of trying to be one.

We were very disappointed that a lot of the performance time, two hours with no interval, contained few acrobatic or circus performers compared to other shows, for a 10,000 one performer with a red balance ball doing contact juggling is really not great. The only exceptions were the hula hoop girl, who was both visually excellent, and dynamic enough to hold your attention, and the balance acts half way through.

The rest of the show was slightly confusing, the large screens showing a mixture of multimedia and realtime feeds from stage, and almost hypnotic visual effects, meaning that at times, the biggest thing in your eye line, the 560 foot screens, became the center of attention, and not the on stage performance. I regularly was distracted by audience members getting up and walking round, and drifted from watching to listening, not sure if I was there for the music, or the visuals.

Personally I think any of the existing cirque shows could have worked well in an arena, possibly with a smaller audience, but the new style arena show wasn’t my cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong, the show visually was stunning, if you were central to the stage, but it lacked the normal Cirque feel and ambiance.

Maybe it was good that the show retired last night, for me Quidam at the Albert hall next year will be much more of the true Cirque experience for us..