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Blog tag – 25 things that you never knew about Rog !

September 2nd, 2009

Regular readers will know that I am a student of Alex Jeffreys Marketing With Alex 2.0 internet marketing training programme. We’re lucky enough to have the benefit of the experience of several of the graduates of “MWA” 1.0, chief amongst which is Gary Simpson.

Gary has resurrected an idea that he tried out for the 1.0 students, a game (?) of what I shall call “blog tag”. You can read all about it here. Anyway, rog-blog.com Blog Of The Day Award winner, Heidi Passey has “tagged” me, so now I have to reveal all ! Deep breath – in no particular order … here goes !

1. I lived in Scotland for 8 years when I was a teenager. I never picked up an accent, but I will occasionally come out with one or two Scottish idioms in my speech.

2. Like Gary, I can’t stand beetroot ! Which is odd, because my mother told me that when I was a babe, I would gorge myself on cheese and beetroot sandwiches. Euch !

3. Again whilst younger, my mother would lift me up to the kitchen cupboard and ask what I wanted for supper. Apparently, I would point at the Marmite jar and say “shammydid”. It took my parents months to work out that what I was asking for was a Marmite sandwich ! (Aussies will recognise Marmite as the nearest thing to Vegemite, which I think is slightly different. If you have no idea what I am on about, check out these links: Marmite and Vegemite.)

4. I can do the waltz, the slow foxtrot, the quickstep, the tango and the Viennese Waltz (which is different than the ordinary waltz – much faster, a little more “dangerous” !). On the latin side, I can do the cha-cha-cha, the rumba, the samba and the jive. I also dance salsa and have previously studied two styles of tango argentino (which is quite different from “ballroom” tango) and the mambo.

Those of us that have been dancing from w-a-y back felt very smug a few years ago when it suddenly became cool to be able to dance following the success of Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing With The Stars. But unlike them, we don’t dress up with sequins and split to the navel shirts. Everybody should learn to dance. Highly recommended.

5. I like tuneful music. That can cover everything from classical to pop via jazz to folk with a number of stops in between. If you love music, it definitely enhances your love of dancing too !

6. I sung in the choir at school and we were broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland. But I’m afraid that my singing voice is pretty poor these days

7. I would like to learn to play the bass guitar.

8. I have logged more time in the air at supersonic speed than most pilots in the Royal Air Force. At least, this is what I was told when I was a passenger on one of the charter flights that used to be run on Concorde before she was taken out of service. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I can tell you that the sense of acceleration when we took off is unlike anything I have ever experienced ! They told us that we’d be accelerating from 0 to about 240mph in less than 30 seconds. Our 90 minute flight from London’s Heathorw airport went out over the Bay Of Biscay before heading to Paris. We returned home next day on a Boeing 737. By comparison, going down the runway in that felt like travelling behind a horse and cart !

9. I have flown over the Grand Canyon in both a jet plane and a helicopter. Wow !

10. I was (still am pretty much) sports mad as a youngster. For those that don’t know the wonderful subtleties of the game of cricket, this will mean nothing. But at the age of 11, I took a wicket with my first ball in competitive cricket (for my school side). It was a full toss and the batter smashed it past me – I took the catch, throwing myself full length to my left like a soccer goalie. The batter couldn’t believe it ! (Neither could I !) My bowling analysis that day: 5 overs, 4 maidens, 3 wickets for 2 runs.

11. I carried on playing cricket in Scotland – yes, there is a hard core of very keen cricketers in Scotland ! My single biggest sporting claim to fame: I took a run from the bowling of the man who (I was told) had previously held the world record for achieving the highest score in first class cricket. Those in the know will probably be able to guess who this was, though I won’t name him in case what I was told was wrong. And besides which, it would then not be much of a claim to fame !

12. In my last year at school, I won the prize for French. But it was more than 20 years before I actually visited France.

13. I have twice appeared on stage in improvised comedy shows before paying customers. I learned how to do this on workshops run by a fantastic little company in London called The Spontaneity Shop. It’s NOT stand-up – the nearest thing that most people are familiar with is the old Whose Line Is It Anyway ? tv shows. I am delighted to see these being rerun in the UK on Dave.

14. I used to take, process and print my own black and white photographs, “analogue style” ! That’s to say, in a dark room with an enlarger and trays of developer, “stop” and “fixer”. Digital technology makes it all too easy these days !

15. I am a Friend of Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory, the highly acclaimed theatre company based in what was (believe it or not) a tobacco factory in Bristol. Now in its 10th year, it has survived more than one funding crisis to go on and sell out for almost every performance in recent years. It regularly garners huge critical acclaim for its minimalistic productions, performed “in the round” in the Tobacco Factory’s unique space. Last year, the world famous polymath, Sir Jonathan Miller directed a fantastic performance of Hamlet. Unmissable.

16. Favourite musical artistes ? Mike Oldfield and Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake & Palmer).

17. When I first started in IT, I was a programmer. We wrote our COBOL program instructions down in pencil on sheets of paper that were transferred on to 80 column punched cards that were fed in to the “beast”, a huge mainframe computer that occupied all of the ground floor of our building.  “Personal Computers” had still not been invented at this point (1980), but now even your mobile phone could probably out-perform it. We have come a l-o-n-g way since then !

18. I know for a fact that programs that I wrote more than 20 years ago are still in daily use today.

19. When I was at school in Scotland, I was asked if I wanted to learn to play a musical instrument. Having struggled with the piano in earlier years, for some reason, I was keen on learning to play the clarinet. On asking for this, I was told that there were no clarinets left in the school orchestra. “But,” they said, “You can learn the viola if you like … it’s just like the clarinet !” The lessons lasted for a year. It’s not like the clarinet at all !

20. I returned to the piano in later life and also took lessons on the Spanish Guitar – a beautiful but infuriating instrument. Not like the clarinet either !

21. My first foreign trip was to Portugal. I wanted some stamps to put on post cards (remember them ?) to send home. I memorised the Portuguese for “Please can I have four stamps to send post cards to England ?” and walked in to the store. The lady behind the counter looked me up and down as I entered and said “Yes, can I help you ?”

22. One of my all time heroes: Spike Milligan. He used to list himself in his scripts as “Spike Milligna, the well-known typing error” ! He is the so-called “father of alternative comedy” because he inspired the members of Monty Python and others too numerous to mention. Retrospectives have shown that in many respects, he was clearly not a balanced individual, but he was an inspired comic and is sadly missed.

23. Last summer, I emerged from a greetings card store near my home in Bristol, only to be confronted by John Cleese, one of the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus who went on to become an international star of TV and movies. He was back in town to speak to his alma mater, Clifton College, and to visit the neighbouring Bristol Zoo, where he fell in love (as it were) with the lemurs when he visited as a schoolboy. I was so taken aback, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Probably just as well … he had his “Basil Fawlty” look on.

24. Current favourite tipple: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Beer drinkers in the UK generally take a dim view of American beers, but many smaller US brewers produce excellent stuff. However, I discovered SNPA a few years ago when my local supermarkert started selling it. Best with a curry. Try it – you may like it !

25. Like Garry, I love the English language. I don’t really know the proper syntax most of the time, but I do try to write so that it sounds “proper” I know that language shifts and changes, and I like that, but a lot of the mangling of language offends my sense of aesthetics … in other words, it just sounds naff !

For example, I get frustrated when radio and TV presenters use singular verbs with plural nouns and vice versa. They should know better ! For example, today I heard somebody say, “There is traffic problems south of London”. You mean “There are traffic problems south of London”. Grrrr ! A grammar-policeman would say “problems” is clearly plural so you use “are” not “is”. And that’s true, but for me, it just sounds so ugly and that’s the worse offence. My old English teacher must finally have stopped turning in his grave now that I am starting to pick others up on proper grammar. Shame it’s from the BBC. Rant over.

26. I would love to learn how to ride a horse !

27. I like to over-deliver.

OK, I am tagging:

• Gil Dotan
• Roger Neumann
• Shirley Cheung
• Iain Buchanan
• Paul Lear

Categories: General

Tags: Alex Jeffreys, blog tag, garry Simpson, Heidi Passey Leave a comment