Welcome to a sunny South Manchester, where the blue sky and clouds look wonderful until you step outside and find that the temperature is slowly dropping inexorably as autumn draws on and we start thinking about winter. It was very pleasant for my walk this morning though.
Let’s dive straight into some silly questions from Sunday Stealing.
(1) Describe yourself in three words.
I think I’ve answered this before and the words I chose were “realistic”, “content” and “nice”. I must have been feeling a little more sensible than I usually am when I wrote that so I will pick three different words for this post as I am feeling a little daft today.
Weird – I like weird books, movies and music and I have a weird sense of humour. Mrs PM is always telling me to “stop being weird”. When I say “weird” I don’t mean that I like to kneel naked in the back garden at midnight on every solstice praying to Gaia. I don’t think I look weird either. I just am a little weird – or perhaps “eccentric” is a better word to use.
Geek – this is related to “weird” in a sense because I would fit into the world of The Big Bang Theory perfectly as a fifth member who wasn’t as intelligent as the four main protagonists (I don’t have a doctorate in theoretical physics – just a BSc with Honours in Computational and Statistical Science). The fact that I worked in IT for forty years compounds this. I like to think of myself as a not so powerful “Powernerd” as depicted in this song by Devin Townsend.
Funny-ish – I can be funny when I want to be – but, mostly, when I don’t mean to be. For example, I sometimes allow myself to speak before my brain has actually thought about what I am going to actually say, i.e. the filter between my thoughts and words occasionally has a glitch. The result is that I say something absurd and people still remind me to this day about some of the things I have said in the past.
(2) What's your favourite dish at your favourite restaurant?
This is a difficult question because it’s tough to tell you what my favourite restaurant is. I have several local restaurants that I like as well as some in the city centre. I will pick one though because recently I had a lamb shank rogan josh in a local Indian restaurant that was absolutely divine. I will definitely have that next time I go there.
(3) Did you set goals for 2026? If yes, how are you proceeding toward them?
When I retired I set up a routine that would enable me to pursue my hobbies and keep myself entertained on a day to day basis. I have set myself the target of writing a (sort of) travel memoir and a novel but neither will be finished by the end of 2026, even though they are progressing slowly. I would say that they might be completed in a year or two – maybe.
The most unlikely goal I set myself was to use my synthesiser to complete and record an original instrumental song by the end of the year. Bearing in mind that I am still struggling to teach myself the piano, I regarded this as the most unlikely thing to complete. But, dear reader, I have managed to record not one but TWO songs on my Digital Audio Workshop, with a third and fourth being worked on. Now, the two songs can be improved and I am thinking about how to do that without ruining them. If I am feeling very brave, I might try to convert them to mp3’s and share them on this very blog at the end of the year.
If I don’t – it’s not because I haven’t completed them – it’s because I am worried about people saying that they are rubbish (which of course they will be).
(4) What's something you have learned the hard way?
I’ve worked with some wonderful people in my career but, as is always the case, I have encountered some (and let’s be kind to them here) “bad eggs” amongst them.
When I was young and naïve, I didn’t really know how to deal with toxic people, especially if they were higher up the food chain and this led me to start questioning both my ability and my own personality.
And then I had a “Eureka moment” when I had had enough and simply confronted one particularly nasty person about his attitude to me and indeed others. In many ways, that was cathartic and I behaved differently to any similar people I met later in life.
Basically, I didn’t take any shit from these arseholes and they rarely made life hard for me after that. Of course, there were toxic arseholes I encountered outside work but they are easy to deal with because you just avoid them like the plague. These days I can spot them a mile off – and there are loads of them knocking about – especially in the world of politics and celebrity.
(5) If you could skip one item on today's to-do list, what would it be?
My routine prohibits me from doing that. Routine is the best defence against procrastination and I have had a real problem with that in the past. Actually, that’s not true – I still have a problem with it now and sometimes even my routine can’t help.
That said ...
Whilst I have been writing this post, I’ve heard the washing machine signal that its current cycle has finished and I can almost hear the remaining clothes in the linen basket screaming at me saying “It’s our turn now”, while, in my head, Captain Procrastination is saying “Ignore them – just do it tomorrow and watch an episode of Supernatural instead.”
It can ALWAYS wait until tomorrow in his head – and now in mine too.
Damn you Captain Procrastination.
