Tag: Blogging

It took ten minutes of chopping – carrot, celery, onion – plus a bag of yellow split peas and some vegetarian stock, add salt and pepper, some more water and, after slow cooking for several hours the kitchen was filled with the wonderful aroma of split pea soup. Thick, creamy, utterly deliciously.

I’ve written about food here before, although I’ve stopped reviewing every restaurant I visit, and used to write even more when I was an active member of the local Yelp community (that got closed down, a fact that still annoys!). It’s such fun to write about food, trying to find more and more ways to describe a flavour, or a texture, or that wonderful combination of both in a dish that simply dances on the taste-buds.

I like food, a fact not lost on my regular reader (hey you!) given how often I talk about my weight for yes, alas the two are inextricably linked given that I tend to eat more calories than I burn.

I’m very privileged of course, living where I live and in a comfortable lifestyle where my main problem is deciding what food to eat, rather than if I will eat at all. If anything we have an abundance of choice, far more than I even remember as a child, especially given the availability of goods that used to only be available in the correct season; that said the seasons still apply, a strawberry in December is not the same as a strawberry in June.

But let’s not get too heavy (pun intended) for food is something that should be enjoyed if at all possible although I am guilty of falling into the “food is fuel” thinking, eating because I should rather than I want to. Thankfully that’s exception rather than the rule, and so most days I eat tasty food that is good for me.

Oh yes, I may be overweight but that’s not because I constantly eat bad food, my breakfasts are typically porridge and fruit (with a skimmed milk, sugar-free vanilla latte), my lunches either freshly made salads or sandwiches (not bought from a supermarket) and my dinners are typically cooked in the oven, be they chicken and veg, or just a bit plate of roasted veg (admittedly with some butter but hey, we gotta live!).

No, where I fall off the good eating wagon is the snacks and the chocolate and the desserts. Too often I reach for something sugary, a sweet tooth inherited from my father, and too often rather than one or two little things, it’s four, or seven, or an entire pack.

This I know, and this is the daily battle of emotional willpower versus intellectual knowledge, and even though most days my intellect wins (a rarity in itself!) the days were my willpower collapses completely tend to undo an entire week or two in one fell swoop. I do not fall lightly (because I’m overweight! Ha ha, look at me, laughing at myself).

And then there is eating out, which can be done healthily but more often than not is an indulgence. I do love a well prepared, well presented meal, and some live long in my memory. There is something about having your senses overwhelmed with juicy sauces and piquant fragrances that really seems to make reminiscing on such meals all the more vivid.

Food is a staple, we all need it, and it always fascinates me to see how different people view it. You see articles about people who’ve eaten the same meal every day for years and year, and then read about people who are moving to an insect-only diet. It is a constant in all our lives, yet every single one of us will have a different favourite food, or favourite cuisine, just as we all have differing dislikes (not to mention allergies).

I guess this all boils down to one thing, are you a sane person, or do you actually think Marmite tastes nice?

Do, or do not, there is no try.

The challenge was to get from the outdoor centre to a specified point a few hills away, and back, before anyone else. Four teams were assembled, all going to different points on the map that only they knew, and we all set out at the same time.

I was the leader of the squad and I did not like to fail. We set off and all was going well, we reached our turning point, where one of the organisers was wanting for us to confirm we’d made it there, and we were heading back, wary of the time as it zipped past, all the time wondering where the other squads were. Were we winning or losing?

About halfway back one of the younger boys started to complain that he was tired, that his backpack was too heavy, his legs sore. After doing my best to lift his spirits and boost his confidence it was evident he was starting to slow us down.

So I took his backpack from him, slung it across my front (I already had my own on my back) and told him that he “had to keep up now” as he had “no excuses”. Failure here, was not an option. As we set off he still languished at the back, head down, demoralised. I shouted at him to keep up.

My name is Gordon and, contrary to that little tale, I am a nice guy. Honest.

Side thought: isn’t that what all nice guys say? And who am I to decide if I’m nice or not, and against what yardstick of ‘nice’ am I measuring myself?

For many years of my life I considered myself, one way or another, a failure. Not in a completist way, but in the far more damaging and hard to detect micro way. Not matter how hard I competed, there was always someone better than me, bigger than me, faster than me, smarter than me.

At school I was in the top classes for Maths and English, but not at the top of those classes. In P.E. I wasn’t great at football, preferring basketball where my height and hand-to-eye coordination could shine through but even then there were two boys taller and better than me.

So I found ways to cope, I picked my battles and worked hard where I was close to the top, eschewing anything that I would immediately fail at. Why bother trying out for the school football team, when I was a guaranteed starter for our house basketball team? Revise and study hard for that English exam, but I’m probably gonna fail Chemistry anyway, so why bother. It’s a crude and basic way to approach things, and I’m still guilty of it preferring to play video games on easier settings so I’ll win, rather than challenge myself to improve and, probably, fail.

Of course, failing is part and parcel of life and it took me far too long to realise how important it is to learn to fail. Dealing with failure is as crucial as learning to win with grace.

Yesterday I wrote about “Trying” and a large part of that was actually about failing and letting that be acceptable. That has freed me up to re-try some things I enjoy as hobbies, safe in the knowledge that I won’t fail at them, because just trying is, in and of itself, very much a mark in the win column!

Master Yoda said “Do, or do not, there is no try” and he is right, well he is right if you want to become a Jedi and save the universe. Thankfully, us mere mortals have less taxing demands so perhaps we need a new Yoda sacrament to be writ; “Try, or try not, there is only fail”, and with that we can learn to fail, and learn that failing is not a bad thing at all.

And, for those who are wondering (and still reading), yes my squad did make it back to the outdoor centre first.

We won.

But looking back on my younger self that day I can see just how badly I failed.

A Saturday morning alarm set for 6.45am.

I try to fight the urge to hit SNOOZE.

I succeed (!) and rise from the warmth of my bed. I have a plan.

Once ready, I head downstairs, eat a slice of toast and rouse Dave, one of our dogs, from his slumber. As ever he gets up and stretches, sleepily padding his way to where I stand in the hall, lead in hand, waiting. I fasten the clips around him, double check my pockets; keys, poo bags, phone. We are good to go and head out in the brisk morning air and start our walk.

It’s early so there are few souls to be seen and those we do encounter are also out walking their dogs. Briefly pleasantries are exchanged and we go on our separate ways. At the park Dave is let off to roam, a little, with his LED collar – essentially for a black dog in the dark – giving away his location. He veers too far sometimes but a corrective call is all that is needed to bring him back to my side.

We walk on, round the park once then back to the street. We head away from home and walk beside quiet roads that are slowly filling with traffic as workers wake and start their commutes. At every gate Dave pauses briefly to check, every shop door is sniffed, the occasional piece of litter consulted, as on we walk.

He can be very focussed – the boy likes to WALK. None of this ambling around for him, no! – and so we pass other early risers who want to stop and say hello but Dave walks straight past, determined to get to wherever it is he thinks he is headed. As we cross roads he pulls one way when we are going another. One day I’ll let him lead us, but not today, that is not the plan.

Another park as the morning light breaks through the trees, a few more dogs to greet this time, but soon enough it’s time to head for home. My stomach rumbles.

The final stop, a final pee, and then we are there, back inside the warmth of our home. Sasha gets up to greet us and I swap dogs, letting Dave off his lead and putting Sasha on hers, she too needs some morning relief but we won’t walk as far, her ageing hips need the rest.

Once done it’s time to feed them both – 8am – and once they’re done it’s my turn. Another slice of toast will suffice for now, they will need their post-breakfast pees soon, so I make my first coffee of the day.

Soon enough they’ve both been taken out again, and I start to prepare the breakfast I’d planned for, scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and toast.

9am is approaching as I plate up and take my seat in front of the TV, just in time for the Rugby World Cup final.

That was the plan.

I’ve been trying NOT to make plans for a long time now, at least I’ve been trying not to micro-plan my day as much as I used to. It’s been working for the most part, but part of letting go of that approach to living, something I did subconsciously for most of my adult life, is also learning to accept that I won’t always manage it but I am trying, and that trying is all I need to do.

And the more I learn to just try, the happier I feel, simply by removing the pressure to succeed all the time.

Now I’m off to watch the Rugby where I hope there will be plenty of tries (do you see what I did there), and no doubt I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to stay awake whilst being very happy to fail (fall asleep on the sofa).

In 1996 I attend a day long training course to learn how to use a new technical language to publish text on the internet. I was working for a small firm in Helensburgh at the time, the internet was still new, we’d only just upgraded to Windows 95, and I was put in charge of creating their website.

That technical language was called HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and still powers the bulk of the internet today. The default browser of the day was Netscape Navigator, and webpages looked very basic consisting of little more than black text on a grey background with some oddly placed images. In the last hour of the training course we were taken through some new developments in HTML which added the ability to make the background a different colour and then how to create clickable imagemaps. Exciting times!

Eager to experiment with this new knowledge I created my own little website, all hand coded in HTML. It was only a few hyperlinked pages kept locally to begin with, and mostly just lists of my favourite websites. As it turns out that is pretty much what many other people were doing at the time,but only a handful were publishing these on the internet for others to see but I was soon to join them quite simply because I could (ahhh memories of angelfire).

I had no grand plan, no burning desire to do much with this knowledge, it was (and still is) a curiosity and a level playing field. I had a website, just like the BBC had a website, just like Microsoft had a website. Were they my peers now? Of course not, my own little website was little more than a handful of pages of not much else of note.

Zip forward to 1997; I’ve built the company website (Crossaig) and I’ve started using the internet more and more, mostly exploring various strands of the Yahoo Directory or following webrings to discover new websites. Some of these had started offering more content, unique content, content written by the person behind the blog. Some were curated list of interesting websites, some were almost like diaries, I was fascinated.

Needless to say you can guess what happened next, I followed suit and in June 1999 I purchased a domain name – www.snowgoon.co.uk – and some webspace and uploaded my own random little website and started writing content. I was mimicking what I’d seen other do (I’m an early adopter, not a culture maker) and having fun doing it.

That website is long gone but the posts still exist here in the archives. I didn’t know what a blog was back then (no-one did) but soon enough an online tool called Blogger came along and made it much much easier to publish content online and the rest, as they say, is history.

It was 20 years ago today that I published a piece of nonsense about Sunglasses to my own little website. Who’d have thunk I’d still be posting nonsense here 20 years later. I may have been going in and out of style, but I hope I’ve at least managed to raise a smile.