Mahinda’s Little World

Helen and I moseyed down to MOSI* on Saturday, for a gander at the Da Vinci exhibition currently being shown there. It promised insights into his works and models based on his diagrams.

* Museum of Science and Industry.

So we paid our money (£7.50 each) and in we went. It was in the 1830s Warehouse, which was the same space used for the BRILLIANT Body Worlds exhibition last year. That was Gunther von Hagen’s masterpiece, featuring expertly dissected bodies preserved using his "plastination" (or plasticisation, or something like that) technique, which essentially replaces a body’s water and fat with plastic

But I digress. The exhibition started with a couple of Leonardo’s notebooks, or codices, housed in glass cases. These were THE REAL DEAL, and quite something to behold. Tiny tiny writing, filling pages from edge to edge, encroaching upon diagrams of delicate precision.

You get an idea of the way someone’s mind works by looking at how they fill a page. I write small and dense, with reasonable margins around the top and side edges, with arrowed notes everywhere…but always a horizontal baseline. I wonder what that says about me?

But I digress. Again.

The next part of exhibition, the bulk of it in fact, was all about models made from Leonardo’s diagrams. In case you didn’t know, he was obsessed by all things mechanical, and built on principles devised by the ancient Greeks to invent new ways of lifting and shifting things, as well as the well-popularised helicopter (I think we actually get the word from Leonardo’s "helical wing" design, which is nothing like a modern ‘copter) and tank.

Unfortunately, we were both sorely disappointed. Here’s a snippet from the feedback email I sent them this lunchtime…

First, the good bits. We liked the displays on his anatomical drawings (although we did think more could be made on these, perhaps comparitive studies against the equivalent modern diagrams), and thought the Mona Lisa study was rather interesting. It was also great to see Da Vinci’s notebooks "in the flesh".

However, the models were, to be frank, a load of rubbish. Not content with taking a cursory look and moving on, we were both interested in how each one worked. Unfortunately, almost every model on display was flawed, from the very smallest right up to the largest.

Many models did not match their diagrams (and accompanying text) at all, even missing the entire point of Leonardo’s design. For example, the odometer was designed to drop a marble per revolution of the big wheel, while the model would probably manage 30 marbles per revolution, i.e. be absolutely useless for its purpose.

Others were better, but missed crucial elements like the gears that would actually make them work. For example, the man-powered helicopter (with a sort of helical screw "wing") was simply a wing mounted on top of what was effectively a wooden box — giving absolutely no insight into the inner workings, which Da Vinci had designed to use all the driver’s muscles, realising (and here comes the bit of genius!) that one man’s arms are not powerful enough to provide the required lift.

I could go on and on. The ideal city with a staircase without the "block of flats" it served. Gears left to operate themselves by magic. My absolute favourite was the spring driven cart…without any springs!

I was actually on the verge of anger towards whichever useless bloody artists were responsible for the travelling exhibition. They clearly had no technical knowledge whatsoever, which is fair enough…but what’s inexcusable was their failure even to TRY and make models that would work. An awful lot were utterly schoolboy errors, that could have been corrected by a ten year-old with a Technics set.

But there you go. You’re better off sticking with the rest of MOSI, which is pretty damn good (working steam engines in the Power Hall being my favourite) and also free…or heading down to the Manchester Museum and its Darwin exhibition which, while far less hyped, has some really interesting stuff. And mummies. And a T-rex.

I’ve finally (a) got the photos up, and (b) grabbed the free-to-air links from Facebook:

• Kuala Lumpur
• Bangkok
• Fraser’s Hill
• Taman Negara

Hope you like ‘em! Feel free to tag away…not that anyone reading this will be on them, but it’s worth a try.

I’m going to go off-piste for a moment. Rest assured that the holiday updates are coming…probably once I’ve had time to forget all the not-so-exciting stuff and just be able to write about the good stuff. Trust me, dear reader; you’ll be grateful for that.

Anyway, anyone who uses predictive text will be familiar with certain sets of words (pairs, triplets or more) that correspond to the same key combinations.

For example, nun/mum, and pint/shot/riot.

Some of these work nicely, e.g. pint and shot can easily be used in the same context, while others don’t, e.g. one’s a noun while the other’s a verb.

Well, for those that do work, I’m going to start using the term ‘txtonym‘. It’s an utter perversion of Ancient Greek (synonym = lit. "with name"), which is sort of fitting.

What triggered that one? Well, I was txting Stockport and I got Stockholm. Which tickled me. I’ve started using the thumby QWERTY keyboard on my phone, and the predictive stuff tries to compensate for pressing the wrong keys…so it really does throw up some good ‘uns. I might use the comments for this post to note down any snorters, and I urge you (dear reader) to do the same.

Right. Shortly, I’ll be off for my work Christmas lunch. Which is nice!

It all started, normally enough, at the airport. Manchester Airport, to be exact. Helen had scored many many girlfriend points (as if she needed any more) by dropping me off at silly o’clock on Sunday morning.

Online check-in worked a charm, and I was on to my flight in a flash, sampling the delights of Etihad for the first time. Well, perhaps not ‘delights’ exactly, but cattle class was certainly reasonable. An okay selection of movies (think I managed rather watered-down versions of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Terminator: Salvation), okay food, okay service, okay amounts of booze (with a distinct lack of bitter lemon for my gin, but I’m used to that). In all, Etihad is okay. Cheap, which is the clincher. It’s strange to see not one but TWO football clubs featured in the literature.

Abu Dhabi Doo airport was all about the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which was due in town the following weekend. From the flight, I caught a glimpse of the shiny new god-knows-how-many-star hotel that actually goes over part of the racetrack. Very shiny.

So, a 7-hour stopover. I meandered round duty free, had some food, found some comfy seats, switched on Helen’s MP3 player (I didn’t have one, so she kindly lent me hers for the trip) and proceeded to read through most of Nation (a new Terry Pratchett book) before napping for a few hours.

TIP: At Abu Dhabi airport’s main terminal, there’s only one block of eight padded reclining chairs for every two or three gates. Just keep on walking ’til you find one. The other chairs look similar but non-reclining, but closer inspection reveals them to be hard plastic.

Day 1: Monday in Transit (not the van)

I awoke an hour or so before boarding, to find the terminal, previously almost empty, filling up. It was now Monday, so the first proper day of my holiday. I then realised that the things I took earlier to be hotel information screens were actually all free internet terminals. Doh!

Anyway, I eventually caught my connecting flight, and a few hours (and then some) later ended up in Kuala Lumpur’s shiny new international airport, the imaginatively-named KLIA. Well, it was shiny and new the last time I was there, so it must be 8 years old now. Still bloody good though. It’s got a sort of rainforest dome in the middle of it all, with loads of tasteful wood panelling (well, planking really) rather than cold steel or grey concrete.

I phoned Aunty Mana, and waited for her to pick me up. She’s the youngest of my mother’s siblings, a chemistry teacher who did her studied at Salford. I timed my trip perfectly (or not) to coincide with her husband and children being on holiday…staying with my folks in Hertfordshire! Consider it a sort of cousin exchange programme.

Either way, she turned up and drove me back to her house in Petaling Jaya (PJ), a suburb to the west of KL. I went pretty much straight to bed, and that was that.

Day 2: Shiny New Camera

Day 2 (Tuesday) in Malaysia was spent lying in, then going round aunty’s local mall to buy a camera (given that I don’t have a digital camera, I thought I’d better pick up a compact job for the trip), before heading back and planning what I was going to do with myself.

Ended up picking up an Olympus FE-4000, on the strength of its 26mm wide-angle lens. A bit cheap, a bit plasticky, but it seemed nice enough. I’d set myself a budget of £100.

Day 3: Batu Caves

Wednesday, and I was joining the wedding party in a trip to the Batu caves, a Hindu shrine to the north of the city. So Michael and Corrine (whose folks were also in PJ) picked me up at 9.30am or so, before picking up Mei (an old friend of Corrine’s, now based in London) and Kaz (her bloke, from Preston as it turns out) and braving the traffic, heading into KL to pick up Kit and Cristie (Michael and Corrine’s neightbours in Dallas) and Jay and Dorothee (also from Dallas, although Dorothee’s French).

Corrine was with her dad (Mr. Wong) in his shiny new Merc E-class. Probably not far off £100k’s worth of car in Malaysia, where all foreign cars are taxed close to double their value. That’s why there are so many Protons and Peroduas, with even a Honda or Nissan viewed as a bit of a status symbol!

Michael was, therefore, driving Mr. Wong’s absolute pride and joy — a 20yo (ish) E-class. Naturally, how he coped with the moderately mental Malaysian driving was going to be a good test of his son-in-law credentials!

We then braved even more traffic and eventually got to the caves. Fortunately, Michael coped admirably, and nobody died.

At the caves, there was a MASSIVE GOLDEN STATUE. Now, I must have been to the Batu caves at least twice before…and I’m sure I would have remembered a 40m MASSIVE GOLDEN STATUE! Turns out it was a 2006 addition, and I wasn’t going mad.

We wandered around a bit, before heading up the steps, moseying around the cave, and heading back down to a stall where we all enjoyed some less-than-ideally-ripe king coconuts.

The undoubted stars of the show were all the monkeys. They alternated between being cute and being right little pests. Jay was feeling rather thirsty, so got some Sprite. A monkey must also have been thirsty, so it leapt up, knocked the Sprite right out of his hand, and proceeded to drink it.

You’d see people walking up or down the many steps holding packets of peanuts, etc. Now, this is just asking for trouble — monkey see, monkey grab. With force and greater numbers, if necessary.

Oh, there was one ferocious bugger that leapt at Kit…but then, he did goad it a little.

After the caves, we headed back to KL, parked up in Chinatown, and went for a meal. It was good. Eventually, Michael and Corrine drove me home, which was lovely of them. It took us a while to actually find the right road, mind — aunty lives in the middle of what can seem like quite a warren if you get it wrong, with lots of roads randomly blocked up with oil barrels. Got there eventually. Slept.

Or at least tried to sleep. I was still having trouble with jet lag, in that 2am Malaysia time was late afternoon back home…and being an evening person anyway, I just couldn’t get any sleep. Oh well, at least I was on holiday and could therefore lie in

Well, perhaps it wasn’t so much of an adventure, as a holiday comprising three distinct parts:

• Phase 1 — week in/around KL, building up to Michael and Corrine’s wedding
• Phase 2 — four days in Bangkok, visiting LizzieWizzieWoo
• Phase 3 — family weekend Fraser’s Hill and then off to the jungle

The catalyst for all these things was Michael’s wedding. Having grown up a stone’s throw from me (well, quite a hefty stone’s throw, but Radlett to Potter’s Bar isn’t exactly far), he’s ended up marrying a girl who comes from fairly close to half my family (my mother’s side being mostly based around KL).

For the uninitiated, KL = Kuala Lumpur = the capital of Malaysia. Fancy not knowing that!

Anyway, having not been to Malaysia since 2001 (yes, really), I thought I’d better make a decent trip of it — it even fell enticingly between work projects, so getting 3 weeks off was possible, rather than highly unlikely. I’d also become somewhat embarrassed with my British friends (Helen included) knowing more about Malaysia than I did, having actually travelled around the place…rather than just spending time with relatives and/or being driven places…which is of course no way to get to know a place.

I wanted to "get my head round" peninsular Malaysia. Sure, I knew my Butterworth from my Malacca/Melaka, but I wanted to have some idea how long it took to get from west coast to east coast, what the rail services were like, where the sights were, and so on. I also wanted to form a proper mental map of KL — for too long, it had just been some sort of huge black box containing shopping malls, Chinatown and the Petronas Towers, with no indication of where all those things were.

The same went for Bangkok — last time I was there, it was 1988 and I was ten years old. I remember a single motel room that we got using some connection of my dad’s — the family was pretty skint at the time. I remember the motel being on a long hot road, and the room itself being mirrored on all four walls. Possibly the ceiling too. Oh.

What better way to resurrect this blog than to tell you about my first "big" holiday for a few years?

Well, there is one better way. I could tell you about my first girlfriend for a few years! I’ve been seeing Helen since July, after Bex played Cilla using the medium of drunken txt msging. We’re really rather good together, in that we tend to like the same stuff and have some definite similarities in personality and outlook. It’s all been rather too smooth, if anything – I once summed it up as a "relationship in comfortable shoes". We’re both in our thirties, we’ve both been around a bit and, before Bex/Cilla (Bexilla?) came along, we’d both been fairly settled into the single life!

There are plenty of pictures on Facebook. I might dig one out for the blog at some point. Sod it, here goes:

Helen, Linden and me at Pete and Sarah’s wedding. We might be a little bit tipsy.
Except Linden, who as usual remained sober all night.

So, back to the holiday. Well, not quite. There have been quite a few more weddings since I last blogged, including two where I had the pleasure of ushering. At the first of these, Andrea and Ed’s, I drunkenly ran a long-term "when’s the baby due" sweep, and said I’d put the times on here. So, here goes:

11 months – Rob
12 months – Vicky
13 months – Jo
14 months – John
15 months – Julia
16 months – Tim
17 months – Alison
18 months – George (best man)
19 months – Ian
20 months – Louise
21 months – Claire C
21 months – Tom (oops)
22 months – Joan
23 months – Dan, or possibly Dara, but it looks more like Dam
24 months – Me
25 months – Caro
26 months – Colin
27 months – Catherine
28 months – Trudi (I think)
29 months – Rich
30 months – Shifty
31 months – Ed (groom)
32 months – Amy
36 months – Rick
36 months – June (oops again)
37 months – Joe
9 YEARS – May (which is looking increasingly like the winner)

I’m not sure about some of those names, and don’t even know who half of those people are. I think there might even have been a phone entry, too.

When was the wedding? I’m not sure, but June 2008 sounds familiar…checking emails, it was June 7th. That makes it 18 months ago, which rules out half the participants, possibly two thirds!

So, my recent exotic holiday. Tell you what…I’ll write about it soon

Pete, one of my workmates, mentioned a few months ago that he’d had a look at my blog for the first time in a while, and seen my last post. If he couldn’t see me sat a few desks away, he’d have been worried that I’d topped myself.

Indeed, it does read that way! I should let you all know that I aten’t dead yet, by means fair or foul. I won’t pretend that it’s all roses and sunshine, especially at work and certainly with the family, but I’d say that, on a purely personal note, I’m fairly happy. Which is nice.

The build-up to Christmas starts here…

Work sucks. In 9 years at the same workplace, I’ve been through some pretty tough times. Working weekends during a gloriously hot summer. Shedloads of unpaid overtime to make departmental ends meet. Two rounds of redundancies, and then being issued with the dreaded "at risk" notice myself. Watching countless friends head out the door, either pushed or of their own free will, fed up either way. But it’s never been quite as bad as it is now. Even "the afternoon of the phone calls" wasn’t this bad. And that was bad, believe me.

So it’s been a tough week. And it’s going to get worse in the morning. I have absolutely no idea what Thursday and Friday will be like.

To make things worse, my somewhat dysfunctional family is imploding. Again. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t two hundred miles away…while at the same time wishing it was more like two thousand.

Sports. Well, my hockey team is losing, and losing, and losing again. My shooting’s been rubbish (nothing new there), and I’m falling out of love with the sport. I’ve also had a bit of hassle due to an attempted break-in at the rifle club. Which I discovered on Saturday.

I don’t seem to have the time to go out for relaxed non-structured non-mad nights out. Maybe I bring it on to myself? There’s no maybe about it. I just miss heading out for a drink at the local with a mate or two. How come I used to be able to do that two or three times a week?

Sometimes I just want to curl up into a ball and hide away from the world. Rather than whizzing around at a hundred miles per hour while keeping completely still. When people ask me what I’ve been up to, I’m finding it difficult to come up with anything remotely interesting.

It may sound strange, but in the last few years I’ve come to understand why recluses and hermits do it.

Ho ****ing ho.

While searching through old emails for the Maria story, I also came up with this one…

Unusually, this story starts while I’m sober, and ends the same way. I was dropping some borrowed books off at Rosy’s place. He wasn’t in, so they went in the paper recycling bin with a txt sent to Rosy telling him where they were.

As I first drove to the house, there was an old man on the other side of the street with lots of shopping bags, who thought I was a taxi. I told him I wasn’t, and dumped the books.

I went back to the car to find that the chap had crossed the road, in prime position to beg me for a lift home, just up Yew Tree Road. He was harmless enough, just a bit doddery and drunk. And Irish. Something of a stereotype, to be honest. He also looked absolutely freezing, it looked as though it might start raining, and I had nowhere else to be…so I thought I’d do a good deed for once.

I was Oliver’s new best friend, it turned out. He was most persuasive about this. I concentrated on trying to pick the valid directions out of his stream of consciousness.

So I drove him down to what turned out to be a little close just opposite the Man City training complex, and helped him with his bags — he was spilling turnips everywhere. When I realised that his place was just off the close, I decided that I should probably lock the car up. In the badlands and all that

So I locked the passenger side door…and realised just as it slammed shut it that my car’s dodgy central locking had decided to work for a change…and lock the driver’s door too. I was locked out of my car, with the engine on and my phone in the door pocket.

BUGGER.

No really. BUGGER.

I helped Oliver home with his bags, and asked if he had a phone — my plan was to phone home and see if I could get Housemate Andy round to pick me up so I could find my spare keys. Oliver couldn’t find his mobile, which I figure was probably just in a different pocket. No matter — he took me round to a neighbour’s place…who looked at us suspiciously and told us that she had no credit. At this point, I was thinking of running home anyway…but there was another neightbour to try. "Lovely girl, I’m sure she’ll help" slurred Oliver.

Like this one but smaller

Knocked on the door at no.4. A miniature Cyberman stared back at us through the window. Not a bad little costume, to be honest. Eventually, the door was opened by a rather attractive brunette.

"Is yer mother in?" asks my erstwhile companion, "this chap’s lost ‘is phone".

"I am the mother" she replies, looking less than impressed.

I shushed him and explained what had actually happened, and Emma (for that be her name) let me use her phone. Turns out Oliver was trying to get hold of the (older) woman in the flat above. Close enough, anyway.

No answer. All other useful numbers were in my phone.

Oliver wasn’t helping — he’d gone into "manic but well-meaning mode" if you see what I mean, where someone’s drunkenly trying to help but really isn’t.

I ushered him home, told him to get some rest, and asked Emma if she’d mind keeping an eye on the car. I then started running the two miles back home. Got to Wilbraham Road…and realised that leaving my car with its engine running, in Rusholme west of the Wilmslow Road, for at least 40 minutes, was not a great idea.

It’s at this point that I realised that I was an RAC member, and they do things like that…so I ran back to Emma’s and asked her if I could use her phone again, this time for an 0800 number. The RAC said they’d be 45 minutes, so she invited me in and we sat there chatting for a while. It was her son’s 5th birthday, hence the Cyberman suit, and we mostly talked about spiders. She made me a cup of tea.

Eventually, RAC bloke got there, laughed at me, poked a metal rod in between door and frame, and pressed the button to wind down the window. Job done. It took all of five minutes.

Well, they say one good turn deserves another…which sort of applied. I’d much rather not have needed to cash it in so soon, though!

Apologies if you’ve heard this one about four times already, but I’ve decided that it NEEDS to be blogged!

So, it’s last November (scary, huh?) and I’ve been out for drinks with the hockey lot. Started in Didsbury and ended at Friday’s Discotheque. Oh dear.

It was dire, and there were fights. I got the drunk bus back home up Palatine Road, somewhat inebriated.At this point, it must be nigh on 3 o’clock on Friday night. I get off the bus and navigate the twists and turns between the stop and Tenby Towers. As I passed the bins halfway down Croma Ave (or is it Redcar? I can never remember), I heard a noise. I looked round.

It was nothing like this…

Imagine if you will a scene straight out of 1950s film noir. It’s a moonlit night, with a chill mist in the air. The panama-hatted gentleman, cigarette in mouth, catches the eye of the fur-coated lady who’d dropped her purse. He bends down to pick it up. She bends down too. Their hands meet. She drops her cigarette as he casts his away. The chemistry is instant…

It was absolutely, categorically, nothing like that.

Instead, there was a pretty blonde girl sprawled across the kerb. She’d come a cropper on the cobbles and toppled off her heels, hitting a wheelie-bin on the way down. Classy.

Santa was clearly a month early, but how did he know? And where was the brunette?

So I picked her up, dusted her off and walked her home, all the way to the end of my street. About 30 yards from my place. I helped the girl open her front door and she invited me in so I could write down my number. Which I did, before staggering home and collapsing into bed.

…or this — I just like the photo!

On Saturday afternoon, just before my hockey match, I got a txt:

"Thanks for walking me home. Did you say something about a party? Love M x"

This confused me for a moment, as I’d completely forgotten about the incident. But then I remembered! I’d picked up a pretty blonde!

So, the party. We were hosting a MUGSS pre-show party that evening, and I’d told the girl to bring herself plus housemates.

But I still couldn’t remember her name. Mary? Marie? Melanie? I ruminated on it through the match, without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Margaret? Madeline? Mandy?

"By the way, my name’s Maria."

Ah yes, that’s it. I’d met a girl named Maria.

So, fast forward a few hours. I’m in the kitchen topping up the punch bucket, when a pretty blonde storms in, asking "Did anyone here walk me home last night?"…yep, she had absolutely no idea what I looked like! Turns out she’d been let in by a housemate and had already asked everyone in the living room.

I say hello, she looks confused, so I give her some punch. Her two housemates, Tom and Fernanda, are standing behind her looking highly amused.

So, a bit later, I asked them what was so funny. Well…

They told me that they’d asked Maria about this random bloke she’d brought back last night. She’d told them that she couldn’t remember much about me. I was, apparently, very English, which seemed odd with a name like Mahinda…quite tall…and definitely, absolutely, positively…blond.

Yes, blond. The one thing she remembered about me was my flowing blond locks.

Exactly how drunk do you have to be to think I’m a blond white guy?!

For a while there was a bit of socialising with the bunch from Maria’s household — like us, it’s a 5-person shared house. However, that’s tailed off, and she’s moved out, in with my mate Matt…but that’s another story. And not really mine to tell.