Monthly Archives: March 2004

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Back in the days of the shop. The very early days. There was a night out, funded by a lens company, probably in lieu of our wages for a month or so. We had to drive from our base in Worcester to wherever the Sigma and Jessop event was taking place. Fortunately, we had a designated driver, a certain person of South Eastern descent who held overall responsibilty for the safety and conduct of this small band of maverick retailers.

On the way back, he took us for pizza to absorb some of the alochol. Then we went to someone’s house, allowing one member of staff (not me) to fall asleep in the loo. We took him home and knocked on the door. His girlfriend answered, and was informed “Its okay, he’s drunk”, whereupon the drunken one fell in, and the door was violently slammed closed. How we laughed.

On the way there, down one of the lanes, we’d encountered a couple engaged in personal activity in a car. Once we’d finished the call of nature, the driver of the minibus flashed the lights and honked the horn. The guy in the car was quite annoyed.

In the morning, the van and one remaining renegade retailer drove to the Malvern Hills, to watch the sun come up and, unfortunately, to cover the floor of the hire vehicle with vomit.

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Site update to Myndzone 2004

Curses.

My attempt at getting the site W3C (HTML 4.01 transitional) compliant has not been a complete success. There has been much to resolve. Theoryzone is now alive again, but is virtually unchanged from the original. If anyone who knows about these things could tell me how to make it HTML4.01 compliant whilst retaining the frameset, I would be most grateful. At some stage I am going to rewrite the content for this section, but the more immediate priority is to fix these problems and to upload rather a lot of poetry.

The picture of the Charles Bridge that appeared in the Blog is currently missing, as I deleted it by mistake. Oops. It will appear, when I’ve tracked down the original. Photos are all currently hosted on the dot mac account. This will have to remain the case, as I don’t have sufficient bandwidth here – but of course, in the longer term, I shall just use the mac space as a picture server, and the albums themselves will be fully integrated on the photozone section of this site.

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We normally tried to get the end breaker, by the car park and with the view down the stretch of beach leading up to the steps by the railway. The space between the breakers was insulated from the wind, and the wooden structures, encrusted as they were with seaweed, barnacles and tar, gave a great frame for the foolhardy to play upon.

Along the prominade there were vans selling ice cream and steps over the concrete wall. Even – at one or two points – slip roads so that you could take a boat down to be launched. Or a 4×4, to get stuck in the sand.

The sand on this stretch wasn’t soft and golden, but a solid and always moist clump. Ideal for sand castles, whose moats could be filled from the sea before giving up their defences altogether to the impending tide.

Families would camp there for days, dissuaded only by the rain showers, when they were forced to relocate to the amusement arcades or the pub. The lights bathed the town with a neon glow, behind which, and back up into the hills, the more traditional victorian stone buildings could be seen, weathered and pastel.

Last known address

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The phone doesn’t

ring

ring, ring            s

                         e

the email       c

              b  n

               ou

and
u don’t txt
when
life, more real
gets in the way

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“He’ll have to drive faster than that if he’s hoping she’ll fall out.”

The white Rover 800 ahead of them, which they’d been stuck behind for the last 20 minutes on the final approach to the town, continued at its painfully slow speed as the driver negotiated the roundabout. They caught a glimpse of the face of his passenger, a woman whose face had turned putrid green. An old man wearing a cloth cap was driving.

“Come on mate, its the pedal on the right.”

The occupants of the black Golf laughed.

“Do you think he’s off to sell her to a halloween mask factory?”

“Nice one Mike.”

He shrugged, reverting back to his normal, quieter self. The Golf followed on across the roundabout, in time to see the Rover speed up as it headed towards a pedestrian crossing.