Not the (excellent but bonkers) movie from Seth Ickerman, which itself was inspired by his (excellent but bonkers) music video for Turbo Killer by Carpenter Brut.
No, this post is about my first experience donating blood to our (excellent but… flawed, not bonkers) National Health Service.
It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long, long time. And not least because doing so would tell me what my blood type is, a part of my medical details that I’ve somehow got into my 40s without finding out.
Every so often over the past 10 years or so, I’d go to the Blood.co.uk website and search for a donation centre, only to find that they were all weirdly far away and wouldn’t have any appointments free for months, and went off the idea. Busy guy, lots to do, etcetera etcetera.
But, being footloose and fancy-free does give you a bit more free time, so I figured I’d give it another whirl. My closest donation point was a ‘pop up’ donation centre near Wolverhampton, around a 35 minute drive away, and the next available appointment was the 20th November.
Astute readers might have noticed that that was yesterday…
Since I was but a small child (as my mother might say, “when I was knee high to a grasshopper”) I’ve had an interest in motorsport in varying forms. It has waxed and waned as time has progressed, but it’s always been there.
I think my first exposure to the world of motor racing would definitely have been Formula One. I don’t recall my Dad being a huge fan of it or anything like that, but it was usually on TV in our house on Sunday (race day) and I have vivid memories of that epic BBC One remix of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain, which became pretty much the de-facto theme music for Formula One in those days.
It wasn’t just F1 that I was interested in, though. That much should be obvious from one of the cars that I drive, heavily inspired by the World Rally Championship as it is. But Formula One, as the name suggests, was always the pinnacle.
I used to while away many an hour on my Commodore Amiga playing Geoff Crammond’s Formula One Grand Prix, which was revolutionary at the time and is still being actively played today! When my brother Bob joined the ranks of early adopters of the original Sony PlayStation, I would sit there playing Psygnosis’ Formula 1.
Geoff Crammond’s Formula One Grand Prix, on the Amiga
My interest in the sport kind of dulled a little in the early to mid 2000s, during the Schumacher years where the outcome of every race was more or less a foregone conclusion, but I would keep a weather eye on each season anyway, and although I’d always wanted to go to a Grand Prix, I’d never really given it any serious consideration.
Until earlier this year, when I made a somewhat ‘last minute’ decision to take an impromptu weekend trip to Milan and Monza, for the Gran Premio d’Italia 2024.
As regular readers will know, I have made a few attempts to start running over my adult life, including a few failed Couch to 5K programmes. I finally managed to complete a C25K last summer, and was surprised to set my 5K personal best at my C25K graduation run, at a cool 29:36.
A few months after that, in November, I did my first 10K race and soon got a few more under my belt, and then separated from Jem. It was shortly after moving out on my own that a friend, Matt, invited me to do the Bedford Autodrome Half Marathon with him, and I thought “well, why not?”
I owe a lot of my sense of humour (and, arguably, my personality in general) to British comedy and comedians.
Whether it was a sitcom, a stand-up show, or a sketch show, if it entered my life during my “formative” years then elements of those shows will be burned into my psyche.
For example, I’ve always had quite a sarcastic and deadpan sense of humour. I attribute this mostly to the character of Edmund Blackadder, played by the (almost literally) inimitable Rowan Atkinson.
As well as that, much of my sense of humour comes from wordplay and surreal, absurdist humour. These I attribute to The Young Ones and The Fast Show, and quotes from both readily flow from my lips in all kinds of situations.
The Fast Show, in particular, is quite rightly held up as the pinnacle of British sketch comedy shows. Obviously comedy is subjective, but for many people the vast majority of the sketches and characters on The Fast Show were hits, with very few misses.
But there is another British sketch comedy show that, in your correspondent’s humble opinion, stands almost as tall as The Fast Show, but is criminally underrated, and it’s called Big Train.
Long-term readers of my website (all two of them – Ed) and, indeed, people that have known me for a long time (I feel like that Venn diagram is just a circle – Ed) will remember that I very much enjoy shooting sports. Here I am, taking aim at a bell target at a local league match a few years ago:
This stems from my parents. Both my Mum and my Dad were keen target rifle shooters in their younger years. Mum was a competition-winning markswoman in the Territorial Army (if I remember correctly) and I’m fairly sure my Dad also had some competitions under his belt.
Both parents would regularly shoot at our local indoor range, under the Telepost Club on Town Walls in Shrewsbury, and almost every year my Dad would take on the responsibility of head Bar Steward at the English Twenty Club at Bisley Camp in Surrey during the 3 week long Imperial Meeting, arguably the most prestigious event in the rifle shooting calendar in the UK (and if not the world).
We would often go to Bisley with him and stay there for two weeks, watching events unfold, joining in with celebrations with the Queen’s Prize winner each year (now called the King’s Prize!). Here’s me and my dear old Mum, stood outside the clubhouse one sunny July afternoon.
My brothers also took up shooting when they were teenagers, although I don’t really remember much about their efforts on the range. So, it’s probably no surprise that eventually I took up shooting sports, too.
I have written here about my air rifle shooting exploits before, so I won’t go into detail here. I also used to do a lot of airsoft gaming back in the mid 2000s, until the laws changed and made the whole thing feel a little less fun. I’m attempting to get back into that in 2024 though, and this Sunday will be attending my second game at West Midlands Airsoft. All good fun, but that’s not what this post is about!
Adding another string to my bow
So, what is this post about? Well, I made a decision a couple of months ago to give archery a try!
The thought was put into my head by a friend of mine from BeEx, Neil (aka Trooper). During our annual BeEx Cottage weekend last year, Neil brought along his archery gear, having recently taken the sport up himself. I’d done a little bit of archery before, but not for a long time. I really enjoyed myself, and found myself wanting more.
So, in the early part of the new year, I sent an enquiry off to Bowbrook Archers, my local archery club. They run a number of beginners courses throughout the year, the completion of which is required to join a club as a full member.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t do the beginners course in February thanks to other commitments, but they had another one in May and June that was much more achievable (although it did mean I had to skip my TKD lessons for six Tuesday nights in a row)
The course was great, it taught me a lot about correct bow technique and safety guidelines and rules (although obviously, having experience with rifle shooting in general, I was pretty familiar with these anyway!) and I had an absolute whale of a time! We did standard archery, and a little bit of “3D Archery” too, which is where you shoot at foam targets shaped like animals and other objects, from varying distances. Despite having a firm stance against ever shooting at living creatures, I enjoyed this enormously, and my shining achievement in that session was to successfully hit a large lizard target that was approximately 60-70 metres from the shooting line:
I’ve now sent off my application to be a full member of the club, and Neil has very kindly loaned me one of his first bows and some associated gear to see how I take to it before I look to acquire my own.
Eventually I’d like to take part in competitions, but it’ll be interesting to see whether I can get up to the required standard!
It would be fair to say that, for most of my life, I’ve lived a somewhat sedentary lifestyle.
As a kid, physical activity was anathema to the enjoyment of my school days. I used to try every trick in the book to get out of PE lessons. Partly because I was so unfit that I just didn’t enjoy them, but mainly because I used to get mercilessly bullied by the ‘cool kids’ (and, in secondary school, one of the teachers) as a result of that poor fitness.
Eventually, I found a way to get out of PE lessons permanently. I (along with some friends) built a website for my secondary school — the first school website in the region, no less — and my IT teachers wanted us to update it, maintain it and look after it on the regular, and PE lessons provided a good time to do this. I think the PE teacher was secretly happy that I wasn’t dragging down his average times any more.
The years that have passed since leaving school have seen various aborted attempts to take up running and other sports. Apart from Taekwon-do, which I started in 2016 and am still doing, nothing stuck.
All of which is to explain why, if you’d said to me just over a year ago that I would be training to run a half-marathon in August 2024, I would have spat my drink right in your face and then laughed heartily. And yet, it’s true.
As people that know me will already know, I’m a gamer. These days, it has to be said, probably more of a ‘casual’ gamer than the hardcore staying-up-until-3am gamer. Age, and indeed, life, catches up with us all eventually.
As you might expect for nearly 35 years of playing video games, there have been some memories that have really impacted me in one way or another, whether it be for comedy value, poignancy, sheer terror or simply just raw enjoyment. So I thought I’d write about a few of them before April 2024 expires and I fail at my not-so-strict-goal of writing at least one post on here every month.
First of all, let me start this post by saying that I promise that not all of my posts from now on are going to be depressing!
Earlier this week, the 18th of March, was the one year anniversary of my Dad’s death. Rather like his death itself, it didn’t come completely out of nowhere, so it wasn’t a shock to the system as such. Combined with my ongoing separation from my partner of nearly ten years, however, it did get me thinking about grief, and specifically how I deal with it. I’m certainly no stranger to death or loss, but I do think that I’ve been ‘luckier’ than some in this regard.
So, this isn’t quite how I imagined my “February 2024” post to be, in the non-existent grand plan of “posts that I can write to meet my self-imposed one per month quota.”
Last Thursday, February the 8th 2024, my wife Jem and I made the decision to separate and, ultimately, divorce.
We’ve had something of a rollercoaster of a relationship in the last couple of years particularly, which has essentially magnified incompatibilities that were, strictly speaking, always present.
We both tried hard to make things work, and we’ve both done things that we shouldn’t have. I’ve learned that I have a lot of stuff stored up in my subconscious, difficulties and traumas from past relationships and other aspects of my life that I really should have put more effort into trying to deal with long before now, so that’s something I’m going to be focusing on more in 2024 and beyond.
It’s the right decision at this point for us to separate. We’re still friends, and we’re hoping that this will continue (not least because we have a lot of shared friends that neither of us particularly want to lose) and we still have a love for each other… just not the same kind of love.
I don’t know what the future holds. This isn’t my first rodeo when it comes to divorce, but it is the first time that I’ve reached the mutual decision to separate with someone that I still like, love and respect. Maybe that will make the next few months easier, or maybe it won’t.
One thing I do know though is that, despite being someone that doesn’t really go in for the whole Valentine’s Day thing, having all of these feelings, and writing this post on today of all days is proving more troublesome than I expected.
I feel like this is a post that I could have written at so many different points over the lifetime of my online presence. I really am terrible at keeping this place up to date.
Well, I’m going to be making a concerted effort throughout The Year Of Our Lord Twenty Twenty Four to change this.
If I can manage at least one post per month, I’ll be a happy bunny. Anything has to be better than leaving it to languish for over four years, right? So, what has been going on in my life since my last post, which was (looks back) on the 4th October, 2019?
