almost witty

A memory-jogging meme…

15 Years Ago, I: (1991)
1. was still in mid Wales, tracing railway journeys on a handy map to get out.
2. doing my A-level maths homework
3. hanging out at the bus shelter with Carrie and Vicki, watching them smoke banana skins
4. banging the headlight of my desklamp whilst doing my A-level maths homework while listening to fantabulous (and new) Radio One FM, which had only just reached mid-Wales.
5. doing my A-level maths homework (again!)

10 Years Ago, I: (1996)

1. Having Russ Meyer movies on the tv in the background while finishing my final year projects
2. Met Stephen Fry twice.
3. Encoding the Doctor Who (1996) movie trailer on a Pentium 90 MHz computer, then putting it on the university servers. It lasted 24 hours before the bandwidth issues forced the sys admins to take it down.
4. Putting on the worst smile in the world at my graduation (I *hate* big ceremonies)
5. Dreaming of getting a job in London, and getting as far as Gerrards’ Cross - the only town in the UK with *two* BMW showrooms.

9 Years Ago, I: (1997)

1. Was living in Wembley, commuting to Gerrards Cross
2. Reading Doctor Who: The Dying Days on the commute up. God, that was a good book.
3. Staying up past Portillo to watch a “monumental change” in British political history, watching Tony Blair take the keys at Number 10 and seeing my bosses look thoroughly depressed the next day.
4. Spending Thursday nights playing Quake with work colleagues, then retiring to a Gerrards Cross hostelry for beer and a gorgeous yummy Stilton burger.
5. Watching the whole death-of-Diana thing unfurl around me in the British media, but not in real life. Even though I lived in London.
6. Saw the Pet Shop Boys performing for the first time at Pride’97, surrounded by gay boys snogging away with gay (whatever else) abandon. And then at a Stonewall benefit gig at the Royal Albert Hall.

8 years ago I: (1999)

1. Living, working and loving London with some cool-ass friends.
2. Left a staid government organisation strugging to cope with the vagarites of new media, for one of the most corrupt dotcoms in Europe. But I didn’t know that at the time.
3. Saw my big huge fat face on the cinema screen for the first (and last) time. (Watch the trailer for Rogue Trader)
4. Saw The Matrix. And had my faith in cinema reaffirmed, if only briefly.
5. Went to Edinburgh to see in the Millennium

5 Years Ago, I: (2001)

1. Work moved from Mayfair to a swanky office in the heart of Soho, opposite a brothel.
2. Then it announced a cash crisis and plans to get rid of most of its staff, and moved to the Docklands. In six months.
3. Got made redundant with a huge cheque, but I was the last man standing so no big huge leaving party.
4. Spent six months unemployed playing Civilisation II, watching Countdown, occasionally going to the gym and watching 9/11 unfurl from a Hammersmith gym.
5. Found a job at the end of the year, and moved to Cardiff to start it.

2 Years Ago, I: (2004)

1. Was getting the hang of this blogging malarky
2. Living, working and occasionally drinking in Cardiff
3. Stumbled across crews filming Doctor Who every so often
4. Work sent me to my first (and last) work conference, SXSW with Mark Boulton, Went on a mini-tour of the US afterwards, seeing friends in California, Arizona, Seattle and St. Louis
5. The year ended on an inexplicable downer.

1 Year Ago, I: (2005)

1. Met Miss R
2. Got severe tonsilitis.
3. Watched the first new season of Doctor Who with a stupid grin on my face. Sometimes with Miss R.
4. Went to Egypt, New York and Vietnam with Miss R.
5. Got engaged in New York with Miss R.

This week, I:

1. Saw Failure to Launch with Miss R
2. Got my redundancy papers, and more bad news
3. Saw V For Vendetta.
4. Fell for the April fool about Coldplay teaming up with David Cameron of the Conservative Party… It was an April fool, wasn’t it? Remarkably consistent one, though.
5. Had my headache obliterated with some Indian food, thanks to Anni. But it came back.

Today, I:

1. was going to go for dim sum
2. ended up buying some in the supermarket and steaming it. Cheaper that way. Yummilicious.
3. was going to compile my CV
4. got distracted by Doctor Who Night on BBC3.
5. still compiling my CV…

One of the signs of stress must be when you’re easily distracted by cool new music.

And of all the radio stations to point me to this little gem by Nerina Pallot called Everyone’s Gone To War, the fact it was plugged by Capital FM-soundalike Red Dragon FM is a bit worrying.

But it’s not the usual pop pap sleazily sold by them. It’s got a great hook, a good beat, some rocking guitar and the lyrics are quite possibly the most anti-war, anti-establishment since the Black Eyed Peas. But we all know what happened to them

Hey, any song that has the refrain “I don’t want to dieeeeee” has got to be worth at least one listen.

Then forget about learning Ajax, Ruby on Rails, or even CSS. Forget about micro-marketing, niche-marketing or blog-marketing your website.

Just set up the simplest website you can think of, announce that if you get to 2m page impressions within a year, your girlfriend will go in a threesome with you for a bet, and watch the page impressions flood in. One million hits in one night. Amazing, really.

When the Dixons Store Group bought Currys back in the last century, I wisely said to myself that it wouldn’t be long before the chav-esque brand of Currys would disappear from Britain’s high streets and be replaced by the slightly-upper-class-chav-esque brand of Dixons.

Fortunately, I wasn’t blogging in those days since I’d have to eat my words with the news that all the Dixons stores in the UK are to be re-branded to Currys.digital. The idea apparently being that we would all go online to buy our electronic goods instead, leaving Currys to sell the white-goods to the non-broadband-savvy.

This is interesting news, except for one huge flaw. I’m obviously broadband-savvy. but yet, when I find myself in times of trouble (like every 30 seconds these days) I like to pop into Dixons, just to gaze in wonder at all the electronic gadgets that would bring joy to my miserable existence for precisely 17.5 nanoseconds. And then if I was going to buy one, I’d look a darn site more seriously at the big-screen TVs, how they look in the real world etc.

It’d be a huge shame if all that were to go.

In about ten days, we will have New Who II on British TV screens. A new Doctor, but otherwise the same companion, and the same production team.

So when I went into the press screening for the new Doctor Who, there was a certain amount of trepidation mixed in with expecting to be bored. After all, when your first “new” series repeats the “epic alien invasion of London” storyline twice, there is a slight fear of repetition. Indeed, even the new trailer for Doctor Who 2006 alludes to it.

I need not have worried.

(Mild spoilers beyond this point!!)

(continue reading…)