Author Archives: Alan

Somebody reconnected with me on Facebook this week, and it brought to mind a couple of amusing anecdotes from childhood involving them – from either end of the compulsory educational spectrum, and both involving the person in question being the butt of a bit of a (mostly harmless) prank.  I’m sure that outside of these two isolated moments we as friends were a lot kinder, but recollecting them made me smile.

The first story happened towards the end of Primary School.  We were on a school trip to Whitby, staying in a large hotel (called the Morningside Hotel if memory serves).  They were serving us breakfast and one of my friends kept asking for more rounds of toast and presenting them to the unfortunate lad, before ordering additional racks of toast – leaving the poor victim surrounded by racks and racks of toast.  Deeply childish, yet still oddly amusing.

Fast-forward now right through to – I think – the fourth or most-likely fifth year of secondary school.  Now, this might seem alien, but our school had only just set up a network of computers in a computer lab.  They were Acorn Archimedes – a step up from the BBC Micros that we had formerly learned on.  They had what seemed like the amazing 3D game ‘Lander‘ for a start (which I could never achieve and successful landing on!!).

Anyway, I digress – basically, this was our first real exposure to the concept of computers being connected to one another – it seems like an odd situation to be in given the ubiquitous nature of the Internet and home networks which I imagine kids are aware of the basics of from an early age now.  Anyway, demonstrating what I suppose was the formative moments of my ongoing fascination with computers and networks, a friend and I were exploring.

Working through the innards of the systems – not really listening to the teacher – eventually we hit the jackpot we were seeking.  I’m not sure how, as hadn’t experienced MSN or ICQ or any kind of computer-based ‘chat’ – but we found the pop-up messenger type application, and managed to decode the naming convention of all the computers on the network.  I can’t remember whose idea it was, I’m going to say it was my friend’s, but it still makes me chuckle to think of it.

I don’t think through any long term vendetta, just by chance, it was the same lad who ended up with the toast who was our ‘victim’.  He was sensibly working on what he should have been doing (which might well have been the reason for the selection – he was concentrating and not messing around).  We selected his computer ID and typed a message – it wasn’t particularly complex or well thought-out – and for some reason, part of it had a Mexican lilt suggested in it.

His computer beeped, and on the screen a box appeared saying “Hello Meester <Surname>” – I can remember the probably exaggerated-in-my-memory pause and look of confusion, then the hastily discussed plans back at our workstation that we should continue the pretence the computer itself was trying to engage him in conversation.  Unfortunately the fact that the chap in question wasn’t daft, and that my friend and I were convulsing with laughter at what we thought to be an ingenious prank cut our fledgling plans short.

Ah, memories.  I wonder what children do these days to fuel that spirit of discovery – or do they just abuse each other on Facebook?

I had another one of those ‘did I imagine that?’ flashbacks to childhood.  This time Google bore out plenty of contemporary references to it, so it’s not just me.  For us it was a staple of Primary School aged birthday parties, for others it seems to have even been a playground game (who needs extra playground games when you can play British Bulldog?!)…

It was a song called ‘The Farmer’s in his den’ – somebody was the farmer in the midst of a ring of children, he was tasked with picking a wife.  The selected wife goes on to pick a child, who chooses a nurse, she selects a dog who, of course, picks out a suitable bone.  The game concluded with the poor child selected to be the bone getting roundly pummelled by all present as they screeched the last verse of ‘we all pat the bone!’.  The whole song was like this:

The farmer’s in his den
The farmer’s in his den
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
The farmer’s in his den

The farmer wants a wife
The farmer wants a wife
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
The farmer wants a wife

The wife wants a child
The wife wants a child
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
The wife wants a child

The child wants a nurse
The child wants a nurse
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
The child wants a nurse

The nurse wants a dog
The nurse wants a dog
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
The nurse wants a dog

The dog wants a bone
The dog wants a bone
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
The dog wants a bone

We all pat the bone!
We all pat the bone!
Ee-aye-ad-ee-oh
We all pat the bone! 

Why on earth that popped into my head is probably something I shouldn’t probe too deeply, but it’s triggered an amusing memory of Rich being ‘the bone’ I suspect at my 11th birthday party (I think 11th) it was hosted at the Nottingham Olympic Judo Club in Sneinton.  Of course, I might be wrong.  On another note, I remember getting an ace mug at that party which was blacked out until it had hot liquid in, which revealed the writing ‘Mist Rolling in from the Trent’

It’s amazing what I’ll waffle on about to avoid looking at the smug face of John Torode.

Back when all buses in Nottingham were green, except for scummy Camms ones!

Here’s one for the folk of Nottingham, particularly those who grew up as kids in the 80s and possibly 70s too.  Big wooden animals in shopping centres that doubled as children’s entertainment?  Can you remember them?  For reasons best known to my subconscious these were thrown into my mind today.

Most clearly I can remember a big wooden grasshopper, which I think had a slide built into it, that I best remember being in a side-room upstairs in the Broadmarsh Centre in Nottingham designed for children to be entertained in presumably whilst their parents perused the shops.  I imagine the shops weren’t all discount stores or emporiums of crap like it it is today.

Upon mentioning it to a colleague, he recalled the grasshopper being ‘in the wild’ – out in the shopping centre itself, he also recalled a Caterpillar, a Horse and a Frog along similar lines.  Yet another friend who I raised the topic with mentioned the grasshopper being in the other shopping centre – near where HMV is today (before it was extended to include ‘House of Fraser’ section that it has now).  When he mentioned it, it stirred possibly earlier memories of it being there, or maybe I just visualised it, I’m not sure.

That led me inexorably to remembering the pirate ship upstairs at McDonalds on Clumber Street, beloved of children’s parties.  When I was a kid I honestly don’t recall ever going to McDonalds except for birthday parties – back then it sold root beer too, and they had sinister men dressed up as Ronald McDonald and the Ham Burglar to add to the party spirit.  I’m still not a big McDonalds eater now, although I don’t imagine it’s still up there now.  I can vaguely recall that there wasn’t actually that much seating in the ship itself, and should you manage to snag one you were in an enviable position indeed!

Can anyone else remember these things?  Do you have any photos?  The best I could find was this low-res picture of the Caterpillar from the Broadmarsh Centre that has been renovated and now lives in a  school.  Is the grasshopper still there in a room off the upstairs shopping mall?  I imagine it as being absolutely massive, but then I was quite small when I last saw it so it probably isn’t all that big.

I’ve no idea why I’ve such a hankering to see a picture of it – initially I wondered whether I’d completely made it up, having had the existence validated by friends and colleagues I was surprised to not find any reference to it on the internet, unlike the other animal Broadmarsh celebrity – the Gordon Scott swinging monkey, who now apparently lives in their new shop on Lister Gate. I’m sure his extraction from the shopping centre led directly to it being so dilapidated and rubbish.

He even has his own Facebook group!

I was a big fan of seeing him too, maybe he was the foundation of my love of all things primate to this very day.  It’s decidedly possible!  So, over to you, if you found this by searching for the lost animals of the 70s, 80s and possibly 90s of Nottingham’s shopping centres, then feel free to share your recollections – and if you have pictures, well, you’ll just be the most awesome person ever!

Since I mentioned them in passing above, I found this old photo of a Camms bus in orange livery – this one’s in Derby, which is a more appropriate location for it – when I was a kid they were roundly derided as an inferior provider of transport – indeed, it was the height of insulting somebody to suggest that they succumbed to the company’s slogan: ‘Catcha Camms’

Camms Collapsibles!

For the eagle-eyed there’s a photo with the caterpillar featured in situ in the Broadmarsh Centre (up near the still-existing Wimpy) at the bottom of this page. (thanks to Thom for spotting this – I found the page earlier but didn’t identify the wooden creature in the snap!)

I had a fiddle around with the ‘Wayback Machine‘ on Archive.org today – if you’ve never used it, you can type a web address into it, and it will look at archives of how the Internet used to appear over the years.  So, armed with the knowledge of addresses I’ve called home on the ‘web over the years, it’s a fun nostalgic vanity-fest to occasionally remind oneself of, well, stuff and nonsense.

My first forays into the Internet came at sixth form – the very idea must seem crazy to today’s youngsters.  We had a trip to Nottingham University to experience it because, get this, we didn’t have the Internet at school yet.  It arrived shortly after, if memory serves, as our school finally gave up the Acorn Archimedes upon which we were taught purportedly useful things to take into the wider world of computing (not!) and installed PCs.

The first website I ever ‘made’ was courtesy of a service called Angelfire – a template-driven space where you could add some text, links, pictures and suchlike (the ‘home page’ provider of choice back in the day seemed to be Geocities but I never had one of those).   They still exist as part of Lycos – and probably offer a more sophisticated service now!  Alas the Archive doesn’t seem to have anything of my fledgling attempts on Angelfire with the exception of the splash-screen I left there upon moving away.  I’m sure it was fascinating.

Either way, this would be around 1996 or 1997 – mostly static content, largely trite and churlish (much like now), and probably involving animated gifs of Beavis and Butt-head.  Come 1998ish and I moved away from templates and was writing html in earnest – indeed, from my investigations I reckon I started ‘blogging’ (not that it was called blogging then – it was having a ‘web journal’ – and posts were much shorter then apparently, and less in-depth.

I had no knowledge of databases or content management systems I could pilfer, so posts were linear and manually added and edited or removed probably using Notepad in Windows 95 and uploaded via FTP when finished locally.  My site at this point had ‘Personal’ and ‘Academic’ sections to chronicle a bit about, well, me – and my burgeoning virtual friend base (when you made friends through Telnet talkers not Facebook!) as well as ‘real life’ friends.

Indeed, Pip and I worked quite hard to make a portal for former students of Arnold Hill to leave messages for one another etc.  Had we perhaps shown a little more endeavour on this project and considered the wider implications we might well have stumbled upon something that might have evolved into a FriendsReunited or even a Facebook.  Unfortunately the Wayback Machine doesn’t have any evidence of our efforts which is a pity!

My first ‘proper job’ post-uni was with a web host.  They gave me a domain name and some space to play with as a perk (and an opportunity to learn about the projects I supported).  I wrote a website and bastardised a perl guestbook script to create a rudimentary blog where I could actually access an online form to type in my thoughts and randomness and have it published without the need for FTP etc. This was in 2000.

Reading through some of this site, which has been well captured by the archive, is at one both fascinating and deeply dull.  Unlike now I was writing on there nearly every day.  Right up until mid-2002 when I moved to a different domain name, and started using a proper database-driven content management system called Geeklog.  I used to make themes for Geeklog which were reasonably popular – that was my first use of this very domain name, Goddammit.co.uk.

So that became a continuation of my inane rambling about life, or whatever was coursing through my mind at the time, combined with a new hobby of creating and distributing themes people could use for their own sites hosted using Geeklog.  I wrote a lot about football too, and experimented a lot with dynamic content like polls and things – and started hosting my photos online in galleries.

This was also the time when webcams were en vogue, although not like now for Skype or similar, just for vanity I guess.  They were a common feature of home pages all over the place – I generally used mine at work.  I had side-projects featuring web-cams of friends and colleagues too – we really were a strange bunch, thinking back.  I used to leave a webcam on the birds at home too (then just Lloyd and Frankie).

I can’t imagine many people derived much pleasure from it, but there you go!  I’d also developed an interest in ‘Photoshopping’ – generally making daft pictures of my friends or colleagues by pasting their faces onto other things and trying to make it look seamless.  There wasn’t much by the way of patching tools or similar back then!

At some juncture (July 2006 I suspect) I switched to WordPress – meaning Geeklog had a pretty damn good innings in terms of longevity of platform.  I can’t remember why, but it was the self-installed variant as I maintained my independent hosting I think by now on a friend’s server as I was by now working at Boots.  2007 heralded the site on this platform – the last thing I wrote on my old blog appears to have been about glass walking!  I wanted to switch to avoid the ‘admin’ of having to update software myself etc since I had moved professionally away from internet type stuff.

I also found the blog post that lamented the day I finally deigned to join Facebook – June 11th 2007.

The drawback with the archives of database-driven sites is they’re less complete than my more manual and clunky home-made efforts – but I might just make half an effort to try to retain and store some of that information.  I really have absolutely no idea what has prompted me to sit and basically write a potted history about my use of the Internet – but there you have it.  It makes a change from my music library related woes I suppose – and does confirm with some evidence (at least evidence I have) that I have been ‘blogging’ since 1998.

Good lord.  You’d think I’d have had better things to do wouldn’t you?  A little bit of me does wish I’d been better at keeping all my internet stuff ‘together’ rather than flitting to new things and abandoning my old writing – dull though it undoubtedly was.

I’ve found telly more and more unsettling lately – having a bonus week away from the office saw me drawn occasionally into the murky world of daytime TV.  A trip to see my granny exposed me to the horror that is ‘Dickinson’s Real Deals’ whilst occasionally the likes of ‘Deal or No Deal’ find their way on to the telly, indeed, Channel 4’s latest quiz offering ‘The Bank Job’ is currently reaching its’ grand finalé as I type and I’ve found it strangely compelling.

The unsettling part was reflecting on just how much telly is basically brazenly exploiting the hopes and dreams of people – Deal or No Deal is the worst, as Noel Edmonds gladly leads his 25 contestants into a game of superstition, sob stories and daring to hope by coaxing ‘what you’d do with life-changing money’ type tales just as a contestant spunks away a golden opportunity of taking home a nice chunk of cash because there’s still the possibility of more.  That’s before you even get into the plethora of reality type shows or ‘talent’ shows that I suppose trade on the same things.

Has it always been like that?  Are we really entertained by seeing people tantalised by the promise of a ‘life-changing’ event or sum of cash, more often than not only to have it taken from them.  I guess when it’s a genuine competition of knowledge or skill it’s a bit less distasteful, but when it’s randomly choosing a box it’s a glorified lottery played out for the gratification of the millions.  I intensely dislike the fact I occasionally find these things compelling viewing, I could absolve myself a little if I were enjoying the potential positive benefit – but that’s not always the case!

It’s a strange world we live in where this carrot-dangling-in-exchange-for-prime-time-tomfoolery is considered entertainment, if you really think about it.  A random thing to write about, but something that’s been idly pulsating around my mind – at least I didn’t write about iTunes Match for a change!  On the bright side, the lass from Derby just went out of ‘The Bank Job’ in the first round of the final, and I must confess I’ve entered three separate competitions on the ITV website this week – so I’m not immune either.