Six - Five

6 Things I Don't Like

• Fingerprints on Sellotape
• The intolerable prats that make up the ludicrous boy band Blue
• The 'cancel job' button on printers- do they ever work?
• Clip on plastic moustaches (pinchy/make you sneeze)
• Old people showering at the swimming pool (Shameless. Put it away - nobody wants to see it!)
• The musical interludes on language courses

and 5 Things I Do (Like)

• Penguins (chocolate or feathered)
• The AutoReverse function on cassette decks
  
• People farting during yoga class (despite them destabilising my Warrior Lunge)
• Anything made by Pifco (no reason)
• Funnels

Me On Fashion

Now I love our Sherlockian couple more than most.

But you can take Benedict Cumberbatch and he will look great in just about anything.

But it is actually his oppo - Martin Freeman - who is always going on about clothes. He's a fashionista. He's an expert. But catch sight of him in the picture and it's always overplayed, overengineered, ungainly. It's fashion for fashion's sake. It doesn't look good on him. It's a look all right but it's just not him. It's not his. Fine actor though he is, he doesn't own it.

I have made a similar error myself when getting a shirt tailor-made. This is a great opportunity to stick an extra redundant button I have thought. Having pairs of buttons will make me look expensive and cool and an individual.

It doesn't. It makes you look like a prat who is trying to say something through the medium of extra button. And failing.

It's a bit pathetic.

Fashion is an overused excuse to cover how you wear yourself.

The reason Cumberbatch looks good in this because he wears the clothes. HE wears them.

The reason Martin Freeman fails, is because the clothes wear him.

Colonel Custard

It's all very well spending the day in front of the computer (apart from a 42 minute run watching episode 3 of Breaking Bad) but when you abuse the power of the internet to send a complaint to Aldi about their Custard Creams you really have to look at yourself.

On the other hand if you have insight to spare… and share, then surely there can be no greater purpose for the Internet than trans-global feedback.

The sort of person who would give of his own time acting spontaneously in (his and) the wider interest, the greater good, would be ....well.... a soldier, a hero, a leader, someone for you lot to look up to.

It's not like we haven't had heroes before - Martin Luther King - Churchill - Mandela... but they had a lot of backing, a lot of popular support. And when it comes to causes... well, let's just say there was a lot of low-hanging fruit around.

But we have reached a time in the world when we need to hammer out the detail.

Heroism, after all, is when you go it alone against the machine.

One man.

A man who knows a good custard cream when he tastes one.

Of course, when Aldi is generous enough to reply and that man uses the opportunity to further suggest that the custard cream selector, should up his game by work-shadowing the jammy dodger guy for a morning, well... some would say that's going a little far.

Not me, you understand.

Some.

Days of Intergalactic Innocence

Ahh.... I knew I wouldn't have thrown it away...

Hard won........

Hard.

Won.

Time Travel

A very strange thing has just happened.
What I am about to tell you is absolutely true and I'd rather like to you to explain it for me.
When I woke up this morning and put on my watch, the time was exactly one hour in advance of the actual time.
Exactly one hour.

There was nobody else in the house.
There was no sign of a break-in.
Nothing else had been moved.
Every other timepiece in the house said 9 o'clock.

But my watch said 10 o'clock.

It is a Wednesday so there have been no clock changes.
No hour forward, no falling back.
And yet my watch was wrong.
Perhaps you thought as I did that my watch may have stopped and restarted with a failing battery.
But the date is correct and I went to bed at about midnight, so it never passed a 10 o'clock.

You're not going to argue it could start going backwards? I don't think that is plausible.
Because the watch is working perfectly.
It's just one hour ahead of where it should be.

It hasn't been on the blink. Recently, the most I've done is had a pin remade to reattach the strap. Nothing to do with the mechanism.

And yet I woke up this morning and my watch was one hour ahead.

I swear to you this is absolutely true.
Explain that if you can.

I have had a think about it for 10 minutes and I've come to only one possible conclusion of how this could have happened. And I don't like it.

Last night I went out I had 3 and a 1/2 pints of a 4% pale ale (it wasn't that pale) called Anglers Reward from the Wold Top Yorkshire brewery.
It was a highly flavoursome beast.
I believe this to be relevant.

And... I swear to you, this is true, although I understand your scepticism... before going to bed last night I watched a repeat of a Derren Brown - Trick of the Mind programme where he does a trick with a watch predicting a time randomly chosen. The chosen time is also indicated by the exact place where he stops on a Ferris wheel during the routine. It's a highly visual, very effective stunt, and having an interest in this sort of thing, I think I know how he achieved at least part of this effect, and I could speculate about the rest.
I believe this to be relevant too.

The next effect in the programme claimed to be a subliminal experiment in which fast frames with subliminal messages were hidden in the short cinema film in order to make viewers forget the main feature that they were about to watch (which was Ocean's 12). I didn't really bother watching this I had seen it before, but I knew the idea.

In what is the now last half an hour, I've come to only one conclusion of how my watch this morning was one hour in advance.

And it pains me to say it.

It's pretty clear to me that in the night I woke, some beery chemicals in my head, I must've turned on the bedside light and then I advanced my watch exactly one hour forward, turned off the light and went back
to sleep.
I have absolutely no memory of this and I rather wish it wasn't so.

Nevertheless it is a conclusion I've been forced into.
There might be something in this suggestion thing after all.
I'd give it some thought... but I'm either late for a meeting... or early.... I just can't decide watch.

Something Wicked

Well today I am going to throw them away. I've been staring at them for a while and it's a shame, but they have got to go...my remaining tape cassette computer games.

Of course, many of them are not entirely original (ahem), but as a young teenager cash flow could be a bit of an issue.

But I look at the names now and I remember well bits.. fragments of hardwired images, names and promises. 

Penetrator was a great copy of the defender arcade game, much played. 

It on a tape with a game called Joust, and on side b is Time-Gate, a larger concept (like a movie compared to a TV episode) with the properties of the hyperspace leap after each level.

There were the little miracles created by the company,  Ultimate, or to give their full title "Ultimate, Play the Game", which astounded everybody with their graphics. Pssst, Jet Pac, Lunar Jet man, Atic Atac were names that will strike a chord with an entire generation.

There were other software  -  Vu3D, Corridors of Genon, not famous, but I remember writing to a magazine and winning 3 games. Not with any skill, just because I gave it a go. 

So now you know those people who say - "I never win anything" - well ever since I won three games, I haven't been able to say that. Annoying! Of course I never played them anyway they looked boring. One was just for drawing and designing pictures. You didn't have too kill anybody.

But all of this promise was waiting for you at the promise of a single concept, which was this : Load Quotes.

Or rather Load "" - the command the Speccy needed to receive your bidding (when it felt like it).

There are games played and many unplayed. Many that I only got to level 1, but all of whose images and promise of excitement that I lived with.

That I still live with.

The tapes are neatly labelled and magazine picture cutouts glued onto the front of the WHSmith C15. A 15 minute tape!! WHSmith were teaching us to be pirates - when have they sold a 15 minute tape cassette since?

I'm looking at Cookie, 3-D Deathchase, Kong, Meteoroids, zip Zap (from Imagine.. the Name of the Game, another big brand). There's Zzoom, Halls of the Things, The Pyramid of which I remember almost nothing and Mr Wimpy , which I think I enjoyed playing for a while. The "for a while" of course, is redundant. It just seems suitably nostalgic.

And Magic Mountain, whose colourful image strikes cords.

Of course, on the Spectrum, the defining image of the opening screen was the miracle that peeled into sight during the noisy download.

The tension was heightened by holding your breath in the hope that the programme was going to load, and not fail at the last second, but it was often a coin toss. You learned to live on your nerves. It made me the man I am today. A nervous wreck!

Jungle Fever (or was it Jungle Trouble as it seems I had both), was fun. I remember having the ambition to design a game of my own. Cluelessly optimistic even at an early age, having no idea where to begin programming. I was always impressed by the boys at school who could write machine code.

They might as well have been telepathic.

How ironic that this week I heard on the news schoolkids (do we call the students now ?) are to be taught machine language again.

Too late. I think. Too late.

The machines have already won.

Scrabble I played a lot and successfully managed to load onto the microdrive -  quite a coup in my house both having it and getting it onto the microdrive. This meant that it didn't take forever to load (when the micro drive behaved itself - it was still tape, but a faster version). And when I had gone to bed Dad could load it easily and play Scrabble himself. 

I am discarding old favourites like Arcadia, annoyances like Horace goes skiing, rip-offs like Spectres (which I'm assuming was indistinguishable from the insanely popular Pac Man ) and Tanx (?).

I remember having a soft spot for Dictator but I can't remember why. And filling up that tape is Slippery Sid, Gobble-a-ghost (another PacMan ripoff??), something called Crosser and Demolish. I can't believe I would have played many of those.

And a little bit of magic called the Key... which could unlock the world of game piracy.

Tucked away on the same tape is Tranz Am... had a bit of fun with that one... And on the original Sinclair ZX Spectrum free tape was Android Nim, Stock Market (didn't learn much from that!).. and Biorhythms.. I played that a bit with great fascination and perplexment. You entered your date of birth and graphs of your personal performance and emotion appeared. In fact, the tape inset says the programme plots the "cycling variations of human vitality, emotion and intellect". How about that?

How about that, ladies and gentlemen?

1982!

And in a big doubletape box a game called "The Black Crystal" - an adventure game (everybody was always looking for another Hobbit - the outstanding spectrum adventure game..) but one that was too difficult, or too difficult for me, or just not engaging.

Still hardwired with the powerful image though as this was an original.

I also have one game that I really persisted with. One that not many Spectrum users will be familiar with.

It was called the Black Planet.

It had seven tasks and I played it quite a lot.

On one occasion I completed all seven tasks.

I revealed the secret code word and then could send off for a badge.

I can't believe I would have thrown the badge away, considering what I went through to get it.. but it said something to the effect of "I cracked the code".Or I escaped The Black Planet". And very happy I was to too. It was an achievement. Satisfying because it was difficult.

Those games pretty much marked my entry and exit into computer games.

I do think I've missed out on further worlds. But what can you do?

I have touched on a bit of Sonic the Hedgehog, and been amazed with the worlds. But things are a little bit too 3-D for me now, less interesting.

The great thing is you can go on to youTube, you can go on a walk through many of those unfinished games. It closes off a lot of open-ended synapses. Games you never finished now be completed.

You can relive your childhood.

You can get closure.

Why am I telling you about this in a somewhat literal retrospective?

Well, I'm not telling you this.

I'm telling myself.

This is a note from the past to the future.

The present isn't the time or place for this.

I'm not here to recount my adventures, I just mention one or two along the way in passing.

I am throwing these games away today... but I have a sneaky idea in my head that I haven't finished revisiting them.

I'm really just writing the names down.

So I can come back this wicked way once more.

Lockpicking

I have sometimes criticised myself for taking liberties with rhetoric, allowing myself to dance like nobody is reading on the rhythm of the language.

And yet I rather enjoy receiving new ideas in this way. Prefer it even. It's just more... colourful.

And having taken to it in my daily consultation work for a number of years, I know that it is meaningful to other people as well. Because life is drama as an insurance ad or ITV promo might have claimed.

Of course only me and my secure hostage that get the full force because there is usually a 6 inch steel door holding back the throng of students and spectators and supporters.

I know it's important. But it's not taught. It's not part of our model.

Even the most detailed model of consultation in healthcare (and believe me they get very detailed - the ridiculous mess known as Cambridge-Calgary has 77 different particular performance points to be covered in one short consultation). Clowns and Cambridge Calgary sharing a lack of realism.

But the inspirational moment is missing from their model.

The most important thing of all. Missing by committee.

So I've decided to stop dissing (get me!) myself for the use of this delivered language. I say delivered but not practised because there's no script and very few stock phrases. There's one or two repeated anecdotes but largely we are in improvisational territory. It's a two-hander.

I didn't find this approach deliberately. I stumbled across it as a means to an end, though an accumulation of specific techniques, a peculiar set of interests,a particular set of skills and a desire for a successful endgame. It's been organic.

But now I think it's fully grown, with wings but perhaps to unfold, stretch and test their span.

This has become a personalised consultation model delivered with improvisational thrust at the intersection of a world temporarily shared by two individuals.

That's not just a description of what I am doing. I'd take it as a pretty good description of what we should all be aiming for. 

So I'm happy with it. There is no reason to cheapen it with the words on my internal dialogue dumbing it down to "just rhetoric" - an idea that sings of manipulative political bullshitters. It's not. It's better than that.

Because those improvisational moments of inspirational rhetoric are where change lives. They are the hair trigger to change, simple to remember and the briefest of loops to install. 

You may read similar ideas in books perhaps.

But in life we are the movie. The directors, the producers, the lead and the supporting player.

You are editor. 

You are the entire experience.

You can see your audience and make it real for them. You can deliver the message to their ears, their eyes and their gut. You can make the best skin vibrate with the tone of your voice and make their clarity chime with yours. You can install your thinking onto a part of their brain that you have prepped - ready for the dropping of your I-bomb.

You can send the message right at them at the level of any and every organ in their body. You don't even need to warn them it's coming.

Not everybody will change but they will have to put up resistance that takes too much strength. 

It needs to be easier to go with it. People follow the lines of least resistance. 

Do it well enough and they would require almost delusional resistance to change to defeat you. Some will have even that. That's why we have risperidone, quetiapine and locked high security wards. 

The only way they could forever resist the repeated battalion of my strongest rhetorical weapons is to be already broken beyond repair. To be thinking their daily thoughts on a landscape that is a nuclear winter or the sort of drug haze that can't lay down a new memory or new idea. 

Because with every flicker of resistance, every new argument against change, I'm going to adjust my aim. 

I'm going to file the edges of my newly tooled key, and I'm going to get in.

And when I do, hold on if you can. 

Because change is coming with me.