As I type, it's my 38th Birthday. Nothing bitchenly amazing has happened, since I worked last night and am at work and slacking off whilst I type tonight, I just slept the day off round my Ma's.

She did though have an Amazon box for me;

….though the last one may be a curse as well as a blessing, given its low reputation amongst Who-maniacs. [They certainly aren't infallible though.]

I don't have a hang-up about years or numbers, so I roll my eyes at anyone going "who-ooo, a step closer to the big four-oh". Hey, if we're talking disasters predicted for 2012, neither my 40th birthday nor the end of the Mayan calendar will be anything near as calamitous as Boris Johnson's London Olympics.

I would, though, like to add my annual reflection of how my birthday proves that astrology is bollocks [as if any more proof were needed]; I was born on the same day, at [AFAIK] pretty much the same time, as the Formula 1 driver Rubens Barrichello -

- He's rich. He's famous. He's very talented in what he does. He travels the world, and is surrounded by 'beautiful'* women.

Whereas I… um….

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Weird Coincidence But Not Actually That Weird If You Think About The Probability, #21419:

Some time ago I added a friend from my town's little market, L., on FaceArse. She'd just joined up and was using it to get in touch with her old school mates [from a time several decades before I was at school] and have a few reunions.

One photo which came up in my news feed for some unknown reason grabbed my attention. I clicked on it to see the full version; there was L., alongside one of her old classmates. I peered closer, and clocked the tag underneath; "What the…"

When I next met L on the market on Saturday and talked to her about it, I confirmed what I thought. The woman was Mrs. B……….., and she had been my GCSE English teacher back in Romford over twenty years ago. Still teaching in a different part of East London, and although obviously there was a difference in what twenty-something years had done, still very much looking the same.

It's hard to describe the feelings this brought to me; a kind of mixture of "ooooh…" and "AAAAARGH!!!" – this period of my life was a highly turbulent and volatile one [yes, okay, and quite a lot of the time it was also a drunk and stoned one]. Learning about 'the Scottish play' was not high on my personal agenda then, let's say.

In fact, when I mentioned all the above to my mother today, she said; "Oh yes, Mrs B….., I remember her; at the last Parents' Evening before you left school, she was almost screaming with despair at how you just wouldn't write anything. I told her to get you to write about heavy metal, it was the only thing you were interested in."

I can well understand this. It can't have been easy dealing with the teenage me [gawd knows, I only managed it with chemical assistance] and my eagerness to get myself out of the education system as fast as possible.

Also, time [and therapy] has softened my anger which I had at anything to do with school, and I can see what she was trying to do, even if I didn't agree with the way she did it; and I can appreciate the frustration of her compulsorily having to push Shakespeare onto ungrateful teenagers. I'll even acknowledge the one brilliant thing she did, which was get me to read and understand Orwell's best works.

So once the initial AAAARGH!!! had calmed down, I thought, "well, I've got the link to her FaceArse profile, shall I drop her a message?" And I don't know about that.

Part of me wants to say "hello there, I know I was a right twat then, but I appreciate where you were and what you were doing now, so thank you"; and part of me thinks that's a shit idea, the past should be left as an unvisited foreign country, and although to her there may be the initial curiosity value of "how did he turn into that tranny weirdo social worker?" what else would it achieve?

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas? You know what to do.

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* The F1 version of beautiful, anyway: an identikit tall, slender, blonde, white, holding a pole on the grid and appearing to have the brain of a lobotomised frog. I have other definitions.

Snow Day.

[Well, snow nights if you want to be pedantic, given that it was yesterday evening I was due to work, but told not to bother trying to drive in.]

I haz new shoes, courtesy of my good friends S & C, thus -

- so it's unlikely I'll be venturing out for the rest of the day…

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Also in the post the other day, courtesy of the ubergorgeous Zo;

The art of the euphemism, along with that of the innuendo, are the parts of my language I've always most enjoyed – particularly, of course, if one can combine the two for scatological effect.

Much of this love for the coarser end of the language comes from childhood heroes like Kenneth Williams, himself a master at the loaded phrase.

It's also part of a reaction against the London culture I grew up with, which eschewed euphemism in favour of direct – usually over-direct – speech, loaded with terms the late Mrs Whitehouse would have had a heart attack over.

In my teenage years, it soon became apparent that in this context swearing lost its meaning through mindless repetition [kind of like that famous version of an Alexei Sayle song [warning: serious swearing on this link]] and that the best way to make an impact was to invent a suitable euphemism instead; the best contribution I made to my peers' language was how going for a shit became having an Ivana [rhyming slang, trump -> dump].

I doubt that one appears in this volume – and its publication date of 2000 means it'll miss some of the euphemisms that are part of the zeitgeist as I type – but at least, unlike Viz's Profanisaurus, it won't be filled with circular references that euphemise the euphemisms.

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The earliest euphemism I can remember using, as a playground taunt at an early age, was "your mother wears army boots".

This choice phrase, whose origin is probably in black US culture from the 1930s, long long before "yo'mamma" was a childish Internet forum stipend, I think may also have been an example of homophobia – coming from the same direction as "she wears 'comfortable shoes'."

Certainly we were unaware, at least consciously, of any such meanings at the time – in the late 1970s these things were still very much taboo – but at least, unlike the casual mindless use of gay for "bad" now, showed a little creative thinking in whoever coined it.

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As taboos change, so do the euphemisms. Not all of them are fun. One nasty one that's crept into the language, warping a perfectly useful word, over the past few years is any reference to the "indigenous British" – used by white supremacists to try to claim some form of entitlement to their ludicrous ideas.

Despite that, it's still a dynamic and inventive area of language – and there's always room for more. So for today's big question what I want y'all to do is try and invent a new euphemism, which may well sweep the nation [just like the Mudshark did].

You don't have to say what it's for – part of the fun will be guessing. I'm going to suggest "the giraffe wants to go for the highest leaves", "he often says 'ooh, she's about my size'", and "he's got shares in Flora margarine".

Over to you!

The down belows are better – thank you to all who left good wishes here and elsewhere – and physically I'm up to normal speed; it's my mood that's been left a little more flat and requiring of "recovery".

This is partly to be expected anyway – I mean, it's December for frog's sake; never the best time to be Fish, with its lack of sunlight, Xmas whacking everybody round the head with a baseball bat, and plethora of "here's why the Noughties were bitchenly amazing already, that is if you don't count the many occasions where people were blown to bits" retrospectives already starting to appear in all media.

One of the main signs that my mood isn't all it should be is that things get stuck in my head. Normally thoughts flow through me like a river, and I can stand by the side and fish the best ones out [provided my tackle's in good form ], but at the minute the usual channels seem to be dammed up. The same water, and the same marine life, is just flowing round and round and round and round…

That's not to say it's always bad stuff that's stuck in there, but most of it is completely and utterly inconsequential.

Example. In the car today I had Iron Maiden's Seventh Son album on, including the nearly-hit single The Evil That Men Do. As was our wont at the time it came out – 88 or 89 – I was singing along to the chorus as "the abdomen of Bob goes on and ooooonnnnn…"

But, try as I might, I have absolutely no idea who the froggin' hell 'Bob' was, if he was of a portly disposition, or who decided to modify the lyrics that way for posterity. And the fact I can't recall this information is bothering me to the point where if I don't remember my brain may well explode with the frustration.

The only other 'Bob' which comes to mind is, similarly, from what now seems like ancient history…

"In fact, you're a girl with as much talent for disguise as a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club."

Similarly: the other day my brain became absolutely obsessed with the idea of getting a new kettle. Yes, the old one had become furred-up to the point where it resembled my ex- in the month of the worldwide Veet shortage, but that's no reason to have every other thing on my [mental] shopping list dropping completely out of my head the moment I entered within range of a supermarket.

[Although I'm lucky, I guess, that I'm not the guy with memory/concentration difficulties I used to work with who went through a phase of buying gravy powder on every food shop, just in case he needed any. He ended up with about thirty cans of it in his cupboard before the phenomenon subsided. I've lost touch with him but I guess he's still getting through them.]

So: if any of you find your mails unanswered, your bitchenly amazing blog post / status update uncommented, or your Xmas cards unsent, please don't take it personally.

And if you happen to get a parcel off me, expecting some hot shooz, bonzer music or squid-related silliness, and it disappointingly turns out to be a box of gravy, enjoy.

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Today's Big Question: What [inconsequential, not depressive] things, tasks or memories get stuck in your head? How do you overcome this?

today to Esther and FB, for the cards which arrived in the post this morning;

…thank you! It's always a delight to receive mail [or, to be accurate, it's always a delight to receive mail that isn't from Big Sodoff Electricity Company telling me exactly how many mortgages I should take out to pay this season's bill].

Unfortunately I'm behind on mailing things out to people – for instance Crow's book, several mix discs, large bundles of letters of love and admiration to Kirsty Wark – but I hope to clear my out-tray by the end of the week.

Clearing Kirsty the cat's out-tray is a different matter entirely…

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Geek Site of the Day [ganked from Dareva]: Strange Maps, collecting many examples where people have taken a different slant to cartography, for instance drawing the Netherlands if it had the population density of LA, or – as below – the northern hemisphere scaled not by miles but by travel times from London. [Glad it's not cultural distance from London, or we'd look so far north-east of the city we'd be somewhere near Uppsala.]

Maps, street-plans and atlases fascinated me as a kid – where other children's favourite books were Winnie The Pooh or Swallows and Amazons, mine was The 1978 AA Road Atlas of Great Britain. There also exists, still somewhere at the bottom of the pile of books in my little house, a volume of maps based on the UK 1961 census similar to those found on the above site – Britain as formed by the then population, religion, dialect, even diet.

Of course, as a London child, the still-revolutionary Tube map was a great fascination – and still is if you count the times I've used it here and elsewhere as site banners…

Plus: In my chemical days, in and around the very early nineties, I remember somewhere finding a street-map of Luton, blu-tacking it to the wall, and drawing on it plans for the military invasion of the town, or its obliteration by ballistic missiles.

In another world, I'd've been a cartographer: this, of course, now that the heyday of the Ordnance Survey's exclusivity to perfect accuracy is gone and inch-perfect satellite photography has covered the whole globe, means I'd now be severely out of work thanks to Google Maps, and probably relegated to drawing extensions to housing estates onto street-maps of Basildon, or designing confusing illustrations of huge shopping malls so that nobody can ever find the toilets. [I reckon we should all rise up in revolt against this, and wee down the escalators.]

This, alongside chemical engineer, brain surgeon, nuclear physicist and Ipswich Town footballer, is one of the great number of once-it-seemed-at-least-remotely-possible Fishes that never quite came to fruition for many reasons, some internal, some external.

In the theory of parallel universes – the idea that all consequences of decisions made do actually exist in their infinite number of separate time-spaces – there must be a range of existences in which Fish not only didn't start drinking heavily in his mid-teens, but also became a frequent attender at his local C-of-E church, attended University, married his first girlfriend Caroline, settled down in suburban Essex with two-point-four children and a mortgage the size of a small African country's GDP, and really likes golf.

Although if I ever met said Fish I'd have to murder him.

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Today's Big Question: What 'parallel universe' you would you want to kill if you ever met them?

Sheesh, has it really been a week since I last posted? It seems like only five minutes ago that I was eating French vegetables with Max, but that was last Thursday and this is this Thursday.

Things have been quiet, with various people on holiday, otherwise engaged or keeping their head down for whatever reason; about the only thing of great note to add here is that a friend of mine, who is currently working on a "literary erotica/fetish magazine", has whipped me up into contributing some lines so they can fill their "Readers' Letters" column. I've submitted four.

This is a lot easier than I expected it would be. You can either put that down to a] one's skill with words, one's ability to envisage these sorts of situations1 and one's previous experience writing fiction, or b] that too much of my teenage years were spent intensely studying top-shelf publications, so I'm over-familiar with the format.

No feedback yet, but it'd be interesting at least to see – if they do make it to publication – a piece of mine [however quickly and fairly unthinkingly done] professionally edited and presented.

The process of selection and editing, and the "professional" aspects of the craft, are what have put me off writing as a career. So far my only published works were, back in the days long ago when I was agoraphobic and had absolutely sodding nothing else to do, contributions to our local paper's letters page.2

In fact, thinking about it, my antipathy to writing to order [rather than to whim] goes back earlier than that, to my English GCSE teacher, Ms Britton – who was not a favourite of mine3 [in much the same way that Pol Pot was not a favourite of mine].

Writing anything for her felt like having my teeth pulled out by a psychotic Armenian; the only assignment I remember enjoying doing was copy-writing for a fictitious advertisement campaign promoting especially medicated toilet paper for people with severe chalfonts4.

Other than that, the teenage me much preferred – at least in school – the objective, unemotional reporting of maths results and physics and chemistry experiments. With hindsight – and the folder of shitty drunken teenage poetry I've still got around the place somewhere5 – I can see this as an attempt [by my sober self] to repress my emotional aspects, which only caused me trouble later on…

Repression juice.

Oh, and I did win 3rd prize for my zebra picture in my first year of infant school / kindergarten. Who'd'a thunk that thirty-two years later ungulates would still be an occasional obsession of mine?

…although other influences may have shaped this too….

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Today's Big Question: What was the piece of schoolwork you still vividly remember doing and being most proud of?

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shoenotes:
1 None of which came from my particular preferences; I'm saving those for my real writing.
2 Along green-left-politics and anti-Xian-homophobes lines, except for one which was a reply to one correspondent who had tried to set out a case for a belief in UFO visitations. My published riposte to him was something along the lines of "That's all very well, but you've missed one important question. Why would an advanced highly intelligent alien race travel thousands of light years to Earth, then only make contact with complete nutters?"
3 Time has of course lessened these teenage resentments, and with hindsight one can see how much she was herself restrained by the syllabus, and that from where she was allowed to deviate from it and put in things like George Orwell I owe her a debt of gratitude. [It's only my French and German teacher I'd still want to disembowel if I ever ran into her again.]
4 London slang, from Chalfont St. Giles.
5 No, I'm not going to reprint any examples of it.

Like just about all people, my feelings about my body are a mix of emotions. There's few people that remain completely free of the neuroses connected with physical appearance, except for those who are 'in another world' enough not to care; but, outside of pathological self-loathing, it's also true that very few people, I think, don't have some part of themselves that they think is their best feature and want to preserve.

For me, the latter is of course hair and legs.¹

My pins, though, aren't looking at their best at the moment.

This may be because of the previously-discussed theatre workshops, which were held in the dance studio rather than the main stage. I was undertaking a piece of improvisatory delight which involved running across the floor, when I tripped over my slightly-too-long jeans, went arse-over-tit, and slid right into the mirrored wall at the side.

No serious damage was done – except, of course, to my 'rapidly diminishing as the years go by' dignity – and luckily the mirror was of an unbreakable sort, so I'm not condemned to a fate of seven years' touring with Nicholas Parsons; but there's quite a bit of bruising on my knees and legs, and they're still sore and tender.

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A Tufted-Ear Marmoset, As Requested By Sam For His Prize:

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To combat the soreness, I'm devoting this evening to one of my infamous several-hours-long baths – at least, they were infamous in the times I lived in places with shared bathing facilities.

The Proms are having a special "Music from the MGM Musicals" evening, so I shall be singing in a somewhat gay² [and probably also horrendous should you be within earshot] manner whilst I soak.

I have my mother to thank for this particular subsection of my musical preferences, thanks to endless Sunday afternoons during my childhood with nothing else to do but join her on the sofa for the classic movie; thirty years later, the same films – and the same songs – always induce a long-lasting contented nostalgic state in me, in a way that only cricket and early Pink Floyd albums can match.

In those pre-video days, you only got films made post-1970 on special occasions, like Xmas or Easter; and older films were still seen as special property by the studios, to be rationed out on licence rather than sold en masse for four-times-a-day Sky-Movies-Pants rotation. You had to wait six months for Star Wars to come on, rather than just Netflix it within three seconds, and if you didn't like the Sunday Afternoon Movie, there wasn't a heck of a lot of alternative choice…

It wasn't just musicals – there were the old massive epics, like Ben Hur and El Cid; the romantic blockbusters, a la Doctor Zhivago and Casablanca; and, very very occasionally, something a little more left-field along The Day The Earth Stood Still lines. The only thing that got switched off was war movies.

It was a great apprenticeship in the golden age of Hollywood. It was only much later that I got more interested in the dark underbelly of what made the industry tick….

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Today's Big Questions [choose either or both]:

- What bit of your body are you most proud of? Which are you least comfortable with?
- What, stemming from your childhood, acts as a "memory comfort blanket" for you?

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shoenotes:
1 Photo here, if you're interested / pervy.
2 An episode of American Dad – not bad though not seriously funny, but I roffled at this bit – had a Republican convention in which homosexuals were identified by having a security guard say "clang, clang, clang"3; one man who then sings "…went the trolley!" is forcibly ejected, despite screaming "No! I just like musicals!"
3 Oh, and whilst we're talking about it; "We Are Klang"? Yes, you might be, but you should also add "We Are Not Actually Very Funny" to that too.