My Dad

My dad is in hospital. he has lung cancer, and I've been waiting for this. He is very ill, and I've been told that he probably doesn't have very long.He lives in Ireland, in County Kerry. There is, realistically, no way that I can get there to see him at the moment. It's not a matter of money; I have other commitments. If I could get on a train and go see him today, I would; but I simply can't get on a plane and leave the country for the weekend right now.

I feel horrible about this, for a variety of different reasons.

I owe this man precisely nothing, except perhaps an extended shouting at.

There are people who live their lives purely for themselves and don't give a damn about other people. I don't like that way of thinking, but I can respect it. But my dad does give damn about other people... it pains him terribly that they don't live their lives purely for him, too.

He is a wonderful artist, and has a lovely way with language. he was a very good teacher for many years (I know this because I have, in the course of my working life, met people who were taught by him).

But he chose to devote his life to drink and drugs.

I have so many stories I can tell about what a selfish and dishonest person he has been in his life. But telling them now won't change anything. The only one that matters right now, is that he abandoned me and my mother, and then moved to another country- and yet he has always expected us to rearrange our lives to help him whenever he had any kind of problem.

I love him very much. And I am so angry at him, and always will be.

Lordsphere

I'm having something of a surreal day right now, for reasons I won't go into at the minute but will probably elaborate on later. Big heavy family stuff is happening right now, and I find myself sitting in front of the computer with half an hour to kill before I have to make a big heavy phonecall.

In the meantime, there's something I've been meaning to do:

That picture at the top of this post is my friend Anton.I've known Ant for years. He is, amongst other things, the best bass player I've ever met.

Ant is in a band called Lordsphere. This is their website. It's very pretty, isn't it?

You can listen to four tracks from their new album here. Good, aren't they?

Seriously people, click those links. I'm not a fan of goth music, and I'm convinced that Ant thinks I don't like his band. If that's true, then he's very very wrong. I think they're bloody fantastic. If you like atmospheric music with guitars, and especially if you're partial to a pinch of metal, you will too.

ALSO

Today, or rather yesterday, I found out- from Lem, again- that Terry Prattchet has early onset Alzheimer's Which is just fucking tragic. I literally JUST finished reading Nightwatch for the bajillionth time yesterday. Before that, I read Making Money, and then re-read Thud as well. I've read nearly every book Prattchet has written, and consider him to be one of our greatest and most under-rated authors. So this is horrible news. 

MY FEET HURT TOO MUCH FOR ME TO THINK STRAIGHT

I was going to write a big long post about the reasons why I don't actually hate the current British government, and think that in many respects they're actually doing a bang up job; I was going to link to Lem's blog, talk about our differences on the subject of behaviour mentors for schools, I was going to offer a few bits of anecdotal evidence from my time in the Health Service... I was going to double back at the end and talk about how, while they are getting a lot of things right, they are still, at heart, a bunch of slimey bastard politicians...

 

I was going to mention that it's really nice to get a link from another blog- I think possibly my first- and especially from someone as sharp as Lem.

 

BUT MY FEET HURT. I have been working like a god damn dog tonight. I just want to be taken somewhere quiet and shot, please.

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BWAHAHAHA

NO IT'S NOT IT'S WYSIWYG MY ALL TIME FAVOURITE SONG

UNBRIDLED JOY

The CD player here in the porter's office finally gave up the ghost a couple of days ago.

Last night, my supervisor went to his locker and got out this big fat old style twin tape and CD monstrocity. It's not the best sound system in the world, but it beats Magic FM.

Just now, I noticed that there was a cassete in one of the tape players. One of MY old tapes.

The tape is labelled http://www.pitchshifter.com/. Because that's the name of the album recorded on it. This album is now practically impossible to get hold of, and it's a fucking classic. I broke my CD copy of it years ago, and had given up the cassete for lost.

I am currently listening to "Subject To Status" for the first time in <i>years</i>. I think the next track is "Please Sir"... I am very very happy.

Multiplication

So, at least one person noticed me messing about, doing test posts earlier (resulting in the slightly surreal occurance of recieving a comment notification for a post I had already deleted!)*; what I was testing was my ability to post to lj and blogger via email, and whether I could put images in posts made that way.

 

Basically, while I've been advocating the "wait and see" approach with regards to the recent developments on lj, I'm of the opinion that it never hurts to have a back-up plan. Which for me means blogger. I'm not prepared to abandon lj completely unless I really have to, because of the social network element. But in every other respect blogger provides all lj does and more.

 

So, what I'm getting at is that I can now be found at both davidwynne.blogspot.com and davidwynne.livejournal.com. From now on I'll be posting everything via email to both blogs at the same time, so they will for all intents and purposes be the same blog, just in two different places.

 

This is of course something of an experiment, and subject to change at any time. If things really get silly on lj, then I probably will stop blogging there all together... but if it all blows over the way I think it probably will, then chances are I'll start using the blogger page for something else, like maybe a sketchblog or something. We'll see, anyway.

 

 

 

                                                                   *the same person also picked up on me demonstrating my presently rather amateaurish grasp of HTML. Nothing happened to my tags, Lem- I just don't really know what I'm doing, yet ;-)

Crossposted From My Livejournal

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I realise that for those of you living in The Kingdom Of Bush this is ridiculously early, but hey, I guess I'm just a naturally generous kind of dude.

...well, okay, now you've all stopped laughing, I'll tell you the real reason: my supervisor is back! Which means I'm no longer covering his position, which means that A) I have to do my share of nights in A&E again, which isn't actually more work, but is much less predictable, so not exactly blogging friendly and B) It'll be a lot harder for me to actually get on the computer for any longish period of time, since my boss is just as much of a net-nerd as I am (if not MORE, really), so he'll be wanting to use the computer when he's not busy. And, well, he's the boss.

So I thought I'd post today's page now, while I know I can.

I will try to keep updating this journal as often as I have been these last few weeks, but I can't promise anything. I've really got into this whole (almost) daily blogging thing, and I want to keep it up as best I can. We'll see.