Project Monkey

Working at home today means I have two laptops and one cat!

Truth is just an environment specific fiction.

So you know you're a bit of a geek when this is your normal desk config. Windows box with dual screens, Linux distro with single screen and macbook running a virtual server with another Linux distro on it.

Went to see Eddie Izzard at the Lancaster Grand this evening, which starts of odd anyway, why you ask yourself? Let me tell you.

Lancaster rarely gets any big name acts, this is because it is a small, almost provincial (to use a term), city in the far North of England that has a moderately small population and no huge venues aside from the Great Hall at the University.

So why was he here. Well he is doing a tour in advance of the European elections in a fortnight and he is playing a host of provincial towns, mostly he was here to host and chair an event at the Nuffield Theatre at the University of Lancaster, and so while here he ran an hour-long (actually was about 90 mins) show at the Lancaster Grand, starting late at night - 10:30 p.m..

Now, strangely enough i knew nothing about the tour, very few people did. Last week I was idling in the SC reserved chat room when one of the people there posted that he was on at the Grand as he had saw it on Twitter. I instantly went to the booking site and grabbed as many tickets as I could (7) and almost jumped for joy. The chance to see Eddie Izzard in a small theatre was just awesome.

I made sure I grabbed two tickets for the Parental Units as they are fun-loving theatre folk. In fact, Steph, is the Theatre Technician at the Nuffield Theatre at the University. So when I contacted Steph she said, great, that's interesting as I will be spending a good deal of the day with Eddie as he s at the university first.

Onto the gig. Eddie was excellent. Truly funny. And showing no hint of losing his surreal and yet provocative edge (as the man himself says, and this is a bad misquote/paraphrase:

...it is like that great thing Python does, to make the small a huge deal and to hide the large issues as almost trivial items...

So, after the gig, Steph grabbed us and insisted we race out of the Theatre (losing some of the people we went with) and round to the theatre door where there was a crowd of people already gathered. Steph was on the phone and then announces that she has been talking to the Tour Manager and we "were in", which meant, to some very surprised people who had to be informed we knew the Tour Crew, that we went to the door itself where we were checked in by the tour manager and checked over by the large bouncer who only let us in.

Then we met Milord of Izzard, Master Eddie.

THIS WAS UTTERLY COOL

There were only two other people in the room with us and Eddie, who Steph introduced us to.

Then we had a bit of a chat, and part of that chat was working out how far North was in regard to Leeds (which was the furthest North he had previously played in England). We thought it was slightly below York, but it turns out we may be a little further north, at least that's how it looked on his iPhone.

Steph then discreetly got us out as we were pretty much annoyinmg the poor man who must be shatterred after performing and working all day and we came home.

So I don't usually have the luck to grab tickets to big names who play at small venues, and I have never met anyone that much a celebrity in my life before, so this was a big thing for me...added to that I am a big fan - this was in fact HUGE...

Still buzzing...

I would have been buzzing from the gig alone which was awesome, but this has added an extra dimension that I will have to call stunning.

This is what happens if you wear pants and the cat notices he hasn't shed on them yet.

Leigh sleeping in the car as always.

Only saw the one bee, so badly named I think.

Lovely place to have breakfast with local produce and fair trade teas

So there is a sense that there is a stream of gibberish in some of the posts that I post in here. I personally don't see it, but I am unable to be fully detached from my own stream of consciousness, to use a literary term, without surgery or some serious strong whammoazoola pills.

There is also, noted by others that I know and some of them real people as opposed to the people who live inside my own arguments[1], a sense that this is more prevalent of late.

So is it?

Possibly. Certainly the looseness of style has maybe increased of late, it hasn't really detatched itself too far from being me. What has happened is a little different to this. What has happened is how I approach the tone.

I first started this blog on the behest of my friend, and business partner, Matt, who suggested that we should blog some of the things we see, talk about, do, whatever as it was midly interesting [2]. He suggested we use this system (Vox) because of the technologies under the bonnet and the fact that it crossed into the areas we focus on in industry [3]. When I first started I couldn't get the tone right, it was halfway business (I am the managing Director and I don't want to be too much me, and too much my job and couldn't get the feeling right, I got close but not truly there).

Well since that time a lot of things have happened in my life. The important ones are:

I got married.
My wife has had two miscarriages.
I became hugely busy with work.

But none of that really affected this at all, well it affected me and I didn't blog for periods of time, but it didn't change me so much here [4].

So what did change.

Well, quite simply, I now have a company blog.

I now have a blog that does anything I need to do in regards to me and how I feel in any form of a professional sense. This blog can now reflect me a little more.

And I like the stream and the obscure,
The extreme and the haute coiture
Magic realism that makes you feel
High culture that is surreal

I enjoy consciousness in the raw. I love Carter, Bond, Carroll, Izzard, Python, Princes of Denmark and the links betwixt them all, so that I can sleep in death of Alice in Prague have a maritime owl and still know that the only way to reduce the amount of crime is to reduce the number of laws we have...

"Who hasn't set fire to a public building, I know I have"

So I started to relax my style in here, or maybe I started to tighten my style, depends on which side of any particular fence you want to stand. Certainly I knew that in this blog I could be the other me, the 'less professional' one perhaps. What is more pertinent to me is it is the me who studied literature not because he wanted a degree but because he wanted to read books and to know more about the subject.

I also wanted to write with another of my voices and one which is closer to how sometimes my mind goes when i really let it off the leash to wander.

So if this is harder to follow and wierd to read and is in your good opinion a piece of shit, then that's fine.

if I was pointing business people to it as my professional blog, I would care about that.

But I am not.

I still point people at it, and I don't hide it from professionals. I link to this blog from my professional blog and vice-versa. I have a link to both from my .me.uk homepage. I am not hiding myself. I am simply being more me, I guess.

What makes me happy, is that I am writing more so anyways I don't really mind...

Actually...I do...I watch other people watching me dance...I care what they think....but, I don't care enough for it to matter....and I certainly will not stop dancing

 [1] Okay so it seems that I need to explain this a little. I am not mad. Well, I am no more mad than anyone else who is considered sane (or not . . . well within reason, I am certainly extremely eccentric - but possibly not as I am not rich enough to be truly eccentric). What I am is open to myself. I often construct arguments in different voices sometimes in my head, and also sometimes outside of my head if I want to speak out loud. It isn't that I have any form of multiple personalities (that I am aware of), it is more that I argue the issues I see from different perspectives and sometimes I like to let them take a hold and vocalise concepts or run with thoughts out loud. Okay, maybe that is mad, meh, don't actually care, people can laugh at you if you dance badly, but it is only when you learn to laugh at yourself that you no longer really care, and have you seen them dance?

[2] Though his is always very interesting.

[3] And that is a much bigger conversation to cover here.

[4] THIS IS A LIE. In truth it really is. Of course I changed, marriage miscarriages, work pressures, of course they change you. Let's face it, the smallest comment in an early morning can change you. What I meant is that they didn't change how I approached writing in here.