Category: Personal

Winners and losers

Oh, it’s the “England and Wales” team now is it, Bastien? 🙂 (Actually that’s another reason the whole thing annoys the rest of us… there have been plenty Welsh and yes, even the odd Scot turning out for the Podgy XI over the years, but it’s funny how they’re all “English” when they win…)

As for hoping Motherwell lose… that’s more of a racing certainty than a flight of fancy I would wager! But that’s one thing I do have in common with England fans– when you lose most of the time, it turns winning into an occasion that the glory-hunting Rangers/Celtic/Man Utd/Chelsea/big-club-of-your-choice types can never truly appreciate 🙂

You boy!!

Michael Sheard died yesterday at the age of 65. Anyone under the age of 30 will probably recognise the RADA-trained Aberdonian from his roles in The Empire Strikes Back and two Indiana Jones movies.

For those of us on the wrong side and living in the UK, though, he will forever be the scariest schoolteacher on the planet– Maurice Bronson, the bespectacled, be-wigged languages teacher at Grange Hill, and arch-enemy of artistic, chain-smoking rebel pupil Danny Kendall (who, after two years of running battles in the corridors, was to die in Bronson’s car when he blacked out at the wheel after stealing it).

They don’t make them like they used to…

Fir Park for Thrills

Mortifed as I am by Motherwell‘s current schoolboyish defensive frailties, there’s no doubt that if you’re a neutral, Fir Park is the best place to spend your Saturday afternoon cash at the moment. In our last five games (four SPL matches plus our final pre-season friendly against Queen of the South), Motherwell have lost at least four goals on four occasions (and past three different goalkeepers). Even more remarkably, we’ve scored four goals ourselves in two of those games as well– in a 4-4 draw with Celtic, and yesterday’s unbelievable 5-4 defeat to Dundee United. A massive early-season injury list hasn’t helped, but at least the coaching staff of Terry Butcher and Maurice Malpas must be feeling it worse than any of us long-suffering fans, having been two of the best defenders in Europe in the early 90’s. They could probably do worse than pulling on the claret and amber themselves for our midweek cup tie with local Lanarkshire rivals Hamilton Accies…

You have flown so high and so well

(I apologise for how suckily this gets laid out if you’re reading on Planet GNOME, but it’s 1am and I’m too tired to do anything about it… visit my blog if you want to see how it’s supposed to look.)

Julie and I did something a bit different yesterday… we took a balloon ride over the self-proclaimed garden of Ireland, County Wicklow. Neither of us had been anywhere near a balloon before, and truth be told we were both a tad nervous, but flying conditions were perfect, and the hour-long, 2000ft ride (and landing) couldn’t have been any smoother if we’d taken a lift1. All topped off in true Irish style with a plastic cup of warm champagne served from the back of a Land Rover in the random field where we happened to land, but we were still feeling so buzzed by then that pretty much anything would have gone down well.


Post script: rather stupidly, I lost my credit card wallet at some point during the “help us drag everything off the trailer and get it inflated” stage. Luckily, on phoning the launch site hotel when I got home and discovered my mishap, somebody had found it and handed it in, but that meant another two hour round trip this afternoon to pick them up. Needless to say, Julie wasn’t too impressed, but by way of compensation I bought dinner up the road at Hunan‘s tonight. We’d never been there before, but it turned out to be an excellent choice– which, with the best will in the world, isn’t something you can often say about dining out in Finglas.

1 Or an elevator, depending on where you’re reading this.

A Bench in Soho Square



I happened to mention the knackered state of one of my Kirsty MacColl CDs in the pub last night, and whilst trawling the web later for possible replacements, I was inspired to have a bit of a poke around to find out a bit more about her. Like many people, I guess, all I really knew was that she was the legendary Ewan MacColl‘s daughter, was married to renowned producer Steve Lillywhite for a while, worked with Billy Bragg and The Pogues amongst others, and was killed in a diving accident off the coast of Mexico in December 2000.

I was surprised to find out she’d collaborated with a lot more people in my CD collection than I’d imagined… Simple Minds, Eddi Reader, Brian Kennedy (okay, he’s not in my CD collection, but Julie likes him!) and Roddy Frame amongst others. The reports of her memorial concert read like a who’s who of intelligent pop from the 80’s… and no, I don’t believe that’s an oxymoron 🙂

Sadly, it seems there’s no imminent sign of justice for Kirsty, despite an eponymous campaign led by her 81-year-old mother Jean. The owner of the boat that caused her death, Guillermo Gonzalez Nova (a wealthy Mexican businessman, who has business interests in the UK in the form of CostCo), was on board at the time, and some eyewitness accounts place him at the helm as it powered through waters from which such craft were banned. Instead, however, an illiterate boathand was charged with negligent homicide and fined all of £61, and attempts to have Gonzalez Nova himself charged as the senior crewmember on board have failed because authorities “couldn’t find him”. Er, right.

In the past year or so, the case has at least been re-opened. Watch this space.

Calling Jeff

Woah, Jeff dude… I know the Irish have a sense of humour, but this really isn’t the sort of comment I’d expect to see in print from a prominent member of our community– particularly one that has a strong Irish developer base. I hope the horror of the situation just temporarily clouded your judgement…

(FWIW, I wasn’t planning to write anything at all about yesterday’s events, because publicity is part of what they’re after… but since we’re on the topic, I’m glad to say that having worked in London during the threat of terrorism, the people are more than resilient enough just to mourn their losses and move right along with their lives.)