Rock my world

Well, that was exciting.

Those of you who are so bored that you've been reading these little missives will know that Tallulah and I went to Avebury last week on our annual use-up-our annual-leave break.

For those of you who don't know Avebury - it's a large stone circle and a world heritage site - see above pic:

Basically, imagine a bigger and more impressive version of Stonehenge that doesn't get the tourist trade because

a) it doesn't have the word 'stone' in the title

and

b) the Avebury builders couldn't be ars*d balancing rocks on top of one another like those flashy gits on Salisbury plain.

I've read that Stonehenge builders were real snobs and wouldn't give the Avebury builders the time of day. They would often sneer and look down on the Avebury builders because they wore unfashionable animal skins, ate the wrong kind of mud and used tools made out antlers from the wrong kind of deer.

I've read this mainly because I've just typed it.

Well, golly gosh. Now the Avebury chaps have got their own back because Avebury is an accessible and cherished part of it's own tiny community whereas Stonehenge is an isolated and inaccessible tourist trap with a mediocre gift shop. I bet the Stonehenge builders are turning in their funerary urns.

Before I get any messages from people who watch far too much 'Time Team' pointing out that Stonehenge and Avebury were built at different times and by people who didn't employ funerary urns I would draw your attention to the following points: Firstly - I don't care. Secondly - I really don't care. Thirdly - I really, really don't care.

(This has been an infomercial on the behalf of the blessedarethegeek "Stuff historical accuracy you beardie-weirdies!!!" campaign).

Anyway, Tallulah and I had a really great day in Avebury, hugging stones. Witness following pic of blessedarethegeek performing 80s pop star pose (with detail removed to protect my super identity):

Our day out in Avebury was followed by another day out in Bath and a visit to my family. The sky was blue and there was even an appearance by that beauteous blazing orb we know as the sun.

Oh yeah, Tallulah and I got engaged as well.

And on that tantalizing note, more soon...

Spring break - yeah!

Very excited today...

Firstly i'm excited because Tallulah and myself are off to Avebury tomorrow on what has become our annual using-up-of-annual-leave outing. Here's hoping that the sun shines (or at least makes an appearance) and the stones (which have stood the test of time for many thousands of years) don't fufill my nightmere scenario and choose this week to fall over, thus turning me into geek pizza.

Mmmmmm.....geek pizza.

Secondly i'm excited because the new Doctor Who teaser trailer has been released in the same week as I got free Doctor Who fridge magnets. Yes, it's only 14 seconds long (the trailer, not the magnets) but having spent the last few saturdays with only Primeval to console me I need some geeky goodness to look forward to.

Incidentally, for those of you who haven't seen it:

Stargate + Walking with Dinosaurs = Primeval

See the Who trailers here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/index.shtml

Hot Fuzzy Sunday

Just thought I'd post today to say that Tallulah and myself managed to catch 'Hot Fuzz' at the weekend and can heartily recommend it at the funniest film either of us have seen for a long time.

Sure, as the son of an Oxfordshire policeman the prospect of an action movie set in the Cotswolds was always going to inspire some sort of a reaction (good or bad) but the jokes came thick and fast and the comic detail was spot on - good to hear some proper Gloucestershire accents too!

Before seeing the film I had been rather worried by a mediocre review I'd read in a certain conservative tabloid (left behind, I might add, by a recent visitor to our household). Suffice to say, the newspaper in question probably reacted badly to the unsympathetic portrayal of Middle England reactionaries - which would seem to be this paper's target audience.

Now that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have brought us a Zombie movie in London (Shaun of the Dead) and an Action flick in Gloucestershire (Hot Fuzz) has anyone got any ideas what they should do next?

Anyone for a teenage High School musical coming-of-age romp set on Orkney?

Part II of the Geeks progress coming soon.

The Geek's Progress - Part One

Well, hello again. Inspiration runs rather too short today and so I thought that I'd follow other blogs I've read and posting a little about myself in case there is anyone still reading this.

It never really occured to me to post anything about myself before - largely because I'm not much of a "me, me, me" kind of person and this blog was meant to be about the writings rather than the writer. Think of these biographical posts as the "about the author" notes at the back of the book.

I'm mostly male, somewhere between 6'1" and 6' 2" tall and 33 years of age (if you don't believe me, cut me in half and count the rings). Currently, a lot of my time is spent wondering what happened to my 20s.

I grew up in West Oxfordshire - which is rural and very beautiful in an Inspector Morse-ey kind of way but suffers from the usual tensions between it's established rural roots and it's new nouveau riche population.

Witney, my home town, was once centre of a now-vanished blanket industry. It's very pretty but it's Douglas Hurd's old constituency (and now David Cameron's base of operations) which makes it probably the safest Tory seat in Britain. This should give you a clue as to how dangerous, edgy and exciting it was to grow up there - particularly when, as in my case, your father is a well known local policeman. Some people are born square, others become squares while others have squareness thrust upon them.

I was educated at Henry Box school in Witney. Henry Box was a 17th century grocer who, my sister proudly pointed out in the Witney Gazette, has recently made it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Just imagine the otherworldly chagrin of all those other 17th century grocers who missed the grade this time around!

My school was a comprehensive with some grammar school pretensions/hangovers. I had pretty uneventful school days and I was lucky in that I was classed as not being bright enough to be "someone to watch" (i.e. Oxford or Cambridge Material) but not dumb enough to be "someone to ignore". Wielding dandruff , a lack of sporting ability and a full range of teenage personal hygiene issues as a form of protective camouflage I was never popular - but courting popularity is not something I've ever approved of.

Art was traditionally my strongest subject and in I always intended to become an artist but after disastrous GCSE Art results (damn my lack of preparatory sketches) I realised that I wasn't going to make it in the art world. I therefore decided that I would study History of Art at University instead.

At the time I told myself my choice of course was down to a desire to broaden my mind, learn a little about our visual culture and bring art to the masses (my mother had imbued me with a gentle form of socialism). As I look back now I realise that it was at least partially because such courses are traditionally full of women.

More soon (whether you like it or not).

Play your curds right

Oh dear oh dear oh dear,

Haven't really been able to blog for a few weeks as we've have had an influx of in-laws.

(To be honest that last statement is a bit of a misnomer - Tallulah and I are not currently in a state of matrimony - the best we can pretend to is being in a state of disarray - and so have no "in-laws" as such. I guess that makes Tallulah's parents my "outlaws".... but you just _try_ getting her father to wear green tights, sheesh).

Elder statesmen in green hosiery aside we have had two visits of relatives from the Scottish side of our relationship and that pretty much puts the computer (in the spare room) off limits. You just try tapping away into the night while two respectable people try to sleep merely feet away.

Just imagine the fuss if I woke one of them up to ask how to spell the word "heinous".

Anyway, I've have spent a large proportion of the previous weeks composing the following ode to the new love of my life. Yes it's true - I have transferred my affections to another as I could no longer stomach our relationship - replete as it was with salty goodness.

I am, of course, talking about my rejection of Marmite in favour of Lemon curd as my spread of preference when breaking my fast.

I haven't had lemon curd for years. Sure, I toyed with some of the other curds - Cherry curd in particular was young and enthusiastic, but her youthful lack of experience left me wanting someone who could touch me in ways I never thought possible.

Lemon curd has been around the block and, as we all know, with maturity comes a willingness to experiment.

So, until I become bored with her and wander off to preserves new (perhaps I'll sample peanut butter's spread-next-door charms again) Lemon curd is my preserve of choice.

I enclose the following ode:

Lemon Curd, Lemon Curd

You give me such delight

Lemon Curd. Lemon Curd

With your tasty bite

You make marmalade look quaint
You make jam look absurd

Lemon Curd, Lemon Curd
Lemon Curd

Why not comment on this blog by telling me your favourite preserve-related anecdotes or poetry inspired by your favourite spread.

The most interesting entry will win absolutely nowt.

Reality Bytes

Well shucks and gosh - isn't it a long time since I last posted?

I wish that I had an excuse for this.

I could claim to have been busy - but I've not been particularly busy.

I could claim to have been working on building up my army of atomic-powered badgers for the day when I intend to wreak badger-flavoured mayhem - but that would be absurd (or perhaps that's what I want you to think).

The truth is that inspiration has been lacking - and life has taken on a post-Xmas 'meh' feeling. Even the thrills of augmenting burrowing mammals with tactical thermonuclear weaponry begin to pale.

January is an odd month - it starts off with all the bells and whistles of New Year, but when you're past all that you are left with the sinking feeling that you only really have Burn's Night before the prospect of a stale chocolate egg in a couple of months time.

Luckily Tallulah and I have our anniversary in March! Hurrah!

Anyway, I've spent the last month or so as I spent most of last summer - studiously trying to avoid watching Big Brother.

It seemed to be a particularly difficult task this time around as, thanks to the shameful behaviour of some really rather ignorant and hateful housemates, Big Brother - or rather it's celebrity incarnation - seemed to have colonised current affairs programmes as well.

I won't comment on recent events except to admit that I succumbed in a small way recently and watched one of the housemates (you know the one) on her eviction interview. I wanted to see how the programme makers would handle such a situation and I was reasonably satisfied to see that she was closely questioned and forced to see herself making the comments and the reaction they had provoked.

Many have commented on the irony that the career of the individual in question was 'made' by the programme and this career now appears to have been broken by it too. Even more ironically the reverse is true - her third series antics made the programme's reputation (such as it was) and now appears to have damaged it severely.

Big Brother is an odd TV programme - the Marmite of televisual broadcasting. You either love it or hate it - in fact I'd go so far as to say that people either seem to love it or react to the very mention of the show as if someone had pulled down their pants and defecated in front of them. Some people also proudly announce the fact (quite loudly) that they've never seen more than a snippet of it - often before you've asked them.

I, on the other hand, have no time for such shameless TV snobbery and admit to having been a past Big Brother fan. I loved the experimental format of series one, tired of series two, rekindled my affair with series three, and then got addicted to series four (when, briefly, a student from my old university looked likely to win). As a result decided to gradually wean myself off the show until I reached the point where I didn't see any of series seven AT ALL.

I wish that I could say that I stopped watching it because I felt it was a tasteless programme, that it took up too much time, that the programme had been turned into a money-spinner or that it had become cruel and arbitrary in it's attempts to grab ratings. All these comments are true - but that's not why I stopped watching.

Truthfully - and it's a rather sad truth - the reason that I stopped watching the show is that I felt that the mere fact that I admitted to watching it led people to make judgements about me. It became a bit of a joke and I became so tired of the shocked "You can't really mean you watch that? - you're reasonably intelligent" response that I gave up trying to argue the point. The fact that I used to watch series one with my late father meant that the "Only stupid people watch the show" argument didn't go down well with me either. It seemed easier to 'go with the flow' and drop my not-so-secret shame.

Stopping watching Big Brother remains the only time that I've ever altered my behaviour or modified my taste to 'fit in' with the prevaling mood. While I'm glad, in retrospect, that I jumped ship before the programme really began plumbing the depths I still see my decision as a betrayal of my personal principles and one I'm (frankly) embarrassed to admit to.

A lot of people seem to think that 'Big Brother' is the worst thing to have happened to television - part of an unspoken theory that merely showing it on Channel 4 has lowered BBC's house prices. It is apparently the nadir of British televisual entertainment and the herald of a coming apocalypse and all of these opinions become harder to deny after the recent debacle. After all, the programme makers could have - and should have - stepped in sooner to deal with those involved in the comments.

Personally, I now think that Big Brother was a once-entertaining television show that's now getting increasingly desperate and nearing the end of it's life. The choice of abrasive housemates and an increasingly manipulative Big Brother means that the programme seems to have become the show it was always depicted as being in the tabloid newspapers - it's just unfortunate to reflect that there are people who don't realise it was ever anything else.

Therefore, I feel, another summer of avoidance beckons...

The links effect

Just a quick note in order to draw the attention of the inattentive amongst you to the crop of freshly garnered links currently adhered to the left of this blog.

"What!" you cry to yourself in astonishment and alarm "there are other blogs beside 'The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth? Do any of the others fulfil our needs in terms of weak puns and poorly-informed rants in the same way you do?"

Well no, actually - but some of them are rather good!

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES is the blog of the light of my life/my long-suffering partner (delete as applicable) Tallulah. Am I worried that she's named her blog after a film about a woman who goes crazy with an axe? - YOU BET I AM.
What you can learn there: How to wear fabulous shoes while coping with a partner who thinks posting photographs of Dalek bubble-bath containers on the Internet is a worthwhile way to spend an evening.

MANTUA MAKER is the blog of a friend of mine who is (quite frankly) the font of all textile and soft furnishing knowledge. In fact she's rather TOO fond of textiles - don't leave her alone with your scatter cushions unless they are old enough to know sin!!!
What you can learn there: The latest in textile and craft design PLUS 101 uses for a codpiece!!!

GRUBLOG is the blog of aforementioned friend who (in this blog) turns aside from the path of textiles and chronicles her own personal gastronomic journey. (i.e. it's about food).
What you can learn there: How to eat well (and co-ordinate your meals successfully with the tablecloth).

See you there soon!