MarkW

Not at the moment: I turned the boiler off and drained the system, and I'm going to leave it until tomorrow before turning it back on again to give my 'special' repair time to set.

"Mark, when you put the floorboards back upstairs, don't forget that the central heating pipes run under some of them." I'll leave the rest to your imagination...

The very first time I needed to use a satnav on the bike I took the old TomTom out of the car and stuck it in the map pocket of my tank bag. Unfortunately I forgot to disable the 'rotate display' function before I set off, so every time I leant into a corner the f*cking map turned upside down!

Because Nigel is the only one who isn't afraid to tell the truth about Europe we beat the Hermans in the war and now they rule Britain we built the Spitfire but Angela Merkel tells us what to do they make laws in Brussels but I'm not racist against them I like pate on a slice of toast but not that one with bits in Britain is an island and when we fight alone we always win well maybe not Dunkirk but that was different and we make the best tea all politicians are liars so are journalists and doctors and scientists only Trump and Nigel tell the truth cos they are the only ones brave enough that haven't been got at by the establishment I left school with no qualifications and shovel shit for a living but I know what I know stop the count every vote counts Nigel for PM.

Tommy Vietor’s “Shapeshifting creep” is too stupid to recognise when he should be desperate. My dogs better at recognising when it’s time to slink off. Yup - that was a great description of Johnson, wasn't it? I have to say I couldn't be happier with how the US election has turned out. I was afraid that Trump might have been completely thrashed by a red-hot opponent, and would have had no option but to shuffle off stage and never be heard from again. But he's been beaten by a senile old duffer, and by a small enough margin that he thinks there's mileage in contesting it. And that press conference that was supposed to be in the Four Seasons Hotel that they accidentally booked at a garden centre next to a dildo store was comedy gold!

Perhaps Boris will make this awkward situation disappear by arranging for the parents to be bumped off in exchange for a trade deal. He's looking desperate enough...

A valve stem sheared off one of the Jeep tyres last week, and astonishingly none of the usual tyre fitters could help as the stems are apparently specific to the pressure monitoring system. The main dealer wanted silly money for what is a five minute job, so I told them I'd do it myself and ordered some stems online. "Ha! Good luck breaking the bead by hand on one of those things!" they said. Never underestimate a man with a Hi-Lift jack and a little ingenuity. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that...

'Twat' is pretty tame stuff. Someone on here once called me a Guardian reader. Oh yes @Slowlycatchymonkey - I haven't forgotten. My arm is long and my vengeance is total... Nice deflection from the reality of your guardian reading, sock n sandal wearing, support group attending, neo liberal self. You’re thinking quick hurl some insults before anyone notices I’m a whole human being. Too late they cried you revealed yourself as a complex thinking human being in the ‘how are you feeling’ thread and now the only way to correct that ‘misconception’ is to go on a full blown rampage. I look forward to the savagery and destruction reaped by the closet Guardian reader. No-one slices n dices quite as well as you. GO go go Rahahahaaa Shit no, what have I said? Wait, dont really, damn I’ve scared myself now What?! Time for one of my 'special' posts I think - toxicity level 7...

'Twat' is pretty tame stuff. Someone on here once called me a Guardian reader. Oh yes [mention]Slowlycatchymonkey[/mention] - I haven't forgotten. My arm is long and my vengeance is total...

I always got a nod on the ZZR1200 and the K1600, but hardly any on the 'Glide for some reason... Anyway, even though I am currently 'without bike' I'm not missing out on the camaraderie of the road: Wrangler owners all wave at each other the way bikers nod. Friendliest bunch you'll meet on four wheels.

No pet that spends any time in this house is likely to be bothered by fireworks!

Bit different, innit?

I have found this thread absolutely fascinating, and it has given me much food for thought – not least because I have known for some time now that I have a Luddite view of mental health, and that I really ought to do something about it. If someone tells me that they have mental health issues I’m sorry to say that I am that person who’s likely to tell them to get a grip and pull themselves together. It happened a few weeks ago, when a smashing young lad at work came into my office to tell me that he was suffering from anxiety. In my typically crass and insensitive fashion I told him that he should try sitting in my chair for a couple of months and see what that does for his stress levels. When I saw his face drop I knew I’d f*cked up. As bad as it was when my old man kicked the bucket it didn’t make me depressed or suicidal or anything remotely like that – I’m just not the type. What it did was make me very angry for a very long time. I took an extremely combative approach to dealing with it, and (I’m deeply ashamed to say) with anyone who got in my way. Even what was left of my own family wasn’t immune: my response to some typically snide comments my mother made about my then girlfriend was to tear the bathroom door off its hinges and lob it down the stairs after her, and when my brother and I argue now he still reminds me about the times I broke his nose. And as it was in our house, so it was elsewhere in my life. I hated my father for what he had done to us, despised his cowardice and lack of guts, and went out of my way to prove that I was nothing like him - no ‘chip off the old block’. When life put obstacles in my path, I just battered them into submission. It got to the stage that my mother genuinely thought that every time I left the house would be my last, until I finally opened the front door one evening to a group of lads who’d come to pay me back for an earlier hiding I’d given one of their clan. I knew that something had to change, and still being a teenage knobhead I decided that I needed to up my game, and took up karate. Funnily enough, it was the making of me. I joined the club as someone who just wanted to be a better fighter, and by the time I left some years later I was a totally different person: “Any more laid back and you’d be horizontal” as my instructor used to say. It took me a lot longer than it should have done to realise that ‘soft power’ – being friendly and always going out of my way to help people whilst still being totally emotionally disengaged – worked just as well, required considerably less effort, and left everyone (me included) feeling good about the experience rather than being in need of medical attention.

I agree wholeheartedly with those who are saying that although we are shaped by our past experiences, we don’t have to be defined by them. Whilst whatever psychological residue remains from my childhood is mine alone to carry and to deal with, after all these year I can’t honestly say that it weighs particularly heavily on my mind. When my dad died my mother thought it would be beneficial for us all to go and see bereavement counsellors. I think she genuinely benefitted from it, and my brother was in his element – wallowing in histrionic self-pity and having other people coo and cluck over him - but I hated it. I have never been able to stand people feeling sorry for me, and after only a couple of visits I refused to waste any more of my time on it. It was winter when we first went, and the three of us would stand at the bottom of the road in the cold and dark, waiting for the bus that would take us on the one-hour journey to the depot, from where it was a half-hour trudge to the bereavement centre. We’d each go into a little room with our personal counsellor, who in my case would spend the first half hour telling me in fluting tones that my father was very ill and that I had to remember that he loved me very much and would never want to leave me. She knew nothing of the hate-filled letter he left, or the plans he had made for a neat little murder-suicide, and I had no desire to put her straight. My head was somewhere else entirely. She was undoubtedly a well-meaning and good-hearted person, but she had a totally inadequate grasp of reality and clearly thought she was doing me good by whispering fact-free feel-good drivel into my ear. I have never had any time for religion for the same reason, and suspected that the only person who really benefitted from our sessions was the counsellor, who could go home at the end of the day with the pious and sanctimonious glow that comes from believing you have ‘done some good’. The funny thing is, those sessions could have done me a power of good and set me off on a much healthier trajectory if they had been done differently. Instead of handing me a pile of coloured wooden blocks and asking me to pick the colour that most closely matched how I was feeling, or getting me to select the adjectives on a set of cards that described my mood, she could have said: “Listen, Mark: your dad was right to kill himself, because he was a c*nt. He left you to face at 15 what he couldn’t face at 48 because he had no f*cking balls – he was just a spineless limp-dick, and if he hadn’t killed himself you should have done it for him and made room for someone who actually deserves the space.” Hmm… now there’s a thought… maybe I’ll set myself up as a counsellor… Years ago, when I was still at university, I was asked by a psychology professor who knew my mother (and thus our story) if I wanted to speak to a therapy group she ran for Adult Survivors of Suicide – that’s the label you get if you make it into adulthood having lost a parent to suicide as a child. I think the face I made then was probably the same one I made years later, when I scratched my nose after changing our firstborn and realised I had some of his shit under my fingernails. You see, I just don’t share this stuff with people – it’s not exactly the sort of thing you bring up in casual conversation, and more to the point, nobody cares. And on the very rare occasions that I have let people ‘in’ I have invariably regretted it. That said, there are times when I think that things would be a lot better if I could just explain myself to people and get them to understand where I’m coming from. Perhaps then I might finally start to feel as though I genuinely fitted in somewhere (other than at home), because for well over two-thirds of my life I have very much been an outsider. My whole “friendly to everyone but friends with no-one” approach exists purely to facilitate normal social interaction whilst at the same time keeping everyone at a safe emotional distance. Most of the time it works perfectly, but whenever I am in danger of forming any sort of more meaningful relationship with someone I invariably sabotage it. I was in a pretty good band for five or six years and absolutely loved it, but as soon as I realised that a certain cosiness had developed between us I killed it stone dead and quit. Just like that. That was nearly three years ago and I haven’t seen any of them since, even though we all live in the same town. When I’m being totally honest with myself, I know that’s not normal. Of course in everyday life it’s pretty easy to be chatty and friendly to people without getting close because that’s just how the majority of social interaction is anyway: I don’t feel that I have to guard against inadvertently striking up a deep and meaningful relationship with the postman, or the bloke who comes to read the gas meter, but where it does cause me some problems is at work. That same ‘rugged individualism’ that was forged back in the darkest days of my teenage years makes me an ‘unconventional’ manager, to put it nicely. I haven’t got the slightest interest in leading or following - I just go my own way and do my own thing as I have for the last 30 years, and if a couple of dozen people want to come along for the ride that’s fine with me. That said, we did our staff appraisals last week, and one of our longest-serving guys said that the only reason the company works as well as it does is because people will follow me out of sheer curiosity. Maybe that’s not so bad…

Back in the summer of 1988 we were driving home after a family camping holiday in France – me, my brother, my mother and my father. When we arrived, three of us jumped out of the car and went inside to do all those things you do when you get home after a long holiday – putting the kettle on, opening the mountain of post behind the door – the usual stuff. Being slightly preoccupied, it was several minutes before we realised that my father had driven away. Sitting here 32 years later it’s a struggle to remember the precise sequence of events that night, but I know that at some point my mother phoned the police to report him missing, and that I went out to look for him several times. What I do remember very clearly is the futility of a 15 year old boy walking every inch of the neighbourhood in the pouring rain, desperately hoping to find his father. The next morning the police came round to tell us that they had found a body 30 miles away in Buxton, and that my mother had to go and identify it. They knew she couldn’t drive - and in any case didn’t have the car- but they just told us where we had to go and left us to it. Thankfully one of our neighbours took us. I can still remember as clearly as if it were yesterday sitting in the passenger seat of his car as we waited for my mother to come out of the police station, listening to the rain gently drumming on the roof and watching the rivulets of water run down the windscreen. When she did finally come out it was to confirm what we already knew, which was that the body they had found was my dad. The feeling I experienced then is one I’ve never been able to describe accurately - as though the ground had disappeared from beneath me, and that I was tumbling through space. Everything that had given my life structure up to that point had collapsed around me, and I completely lost all my bearings. I remember very little of the funeral. It was held in the huge chapel of the university where he worked, and it was packed. Clearly a popular man then, my dad. I’m not ashamed to say that I adored my father, and thought he was fantastic. I had wanted to learn everything I could from him, and I craved his company. Although I didn’t really give it any thought at the time, I always knew that he wasn’t quite so enthusiastic about spending time with me. Whenever I did spend time with him - fixing the car, doing some DIY around the house, or joining in his main hobby which was photography - my presence was barely tolerated at best, and certainly never encouraged. I assumed it was because I was just an irritating kid who pestered the life out of him when what he really wanted was a bit of peace and quiet, but it was an open secret that he much preferred my younger brother, who he thought was far superior to me in every way – especially intellectually and musically. Funnily enough it never bothered me at the time, probably because I was too stupid to realise how morally repulsive it was. Like most people who take their own lives, my father had left a note, and after some initial hesitation my mother allowed me to read it - some time just after the funeral, I believe. Her reluctance was well founded, because in it he made it very clear that I fell some considerable way short of being the son he wanted – if indeed he wanted me at all. As criticisms go it was pretty damning, and the fact that his last thoughts of me had been so hateful came as another devastating blow. He must have known full well what effect that would have on a young boy. But as bad as that was, it got much worse when she went through his papers. His original idea had been to have some company on his journey into oblivion, and he had made quite elaborate plans to take me along with him. This was motivated for the most part by his dislike for me, but also by his desire to spite my mother. In the end it would seem that the logistics of the enterprise were what put him off - not so much a case of what Hunter S Thompson would have categorised as “Too weird to live, and too rare to die” and more “Too worthless to live, but too much effort to kill.” That was the beginning of the end of whoever it was that I was ever going to have been. Perhaps there is a more effective way to take a kind, loving and trusting child and completely destroy every aspect of his personality, but I’ll be damned if I can think of it. The father that I trusted with my life would have had no hesitation in taking it away from me - not out of that misguided love and fear of eternal separation that drives some suicidal parents to take their children with them, but out of contempt, and a mind-set that saw me as nothing more than a disposable commodity whose murder might add a bit extra to the hurt he wanted to cause my mother. It was as though I had unknowingly been in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle, and that at the last moment, for some random reason, they had decided not to pull the trigger; that the only reason I was still here was because of some arbitrary decision he had taken. The anger that made me feel was like nothing I had experienced before or since – a visceral rage that burned so intensely for so long that it incinerated every last trace of the person I had been. Of course if he had decided to take me along with him on that day in 1988 I would have been a lamb to the slaughter, not suspecting a thing until it was all too late. For years my mother had a recurring nightmare that he had come back for me, and that there was nothing she could do to stop him from dragging me away to the grave. Even now, on the rare occasions that he appears in my dreams we are always fighting, and I am always losing. I learned a harsh lesson at 15: if you can’t even trust your father with something as fundamental as your life, you’d be a bloody fool ever to trust anyone. In much the same vein I eventually came to see ‘friendship’ for what it really was, and came to the conclusion that I’d be much better off without it. With the sole exception of my wife, I am as detached from meaningful relationships with other people now (or ‘ruggedly individualistic’ as I prefer to call it) as I was 30 years ago. On the rare occasions when people ask me about not having any friends I make a joke about it being my SAS training (you know – be friendly to everyone but be friends with no-one) and quickly change the subject. The truth is I’m not entirely convinced it’s such a good thing, and have always had a sneaking admiration for people like my wife who make friends easily. It’s done though, and the die is cast. No sympathy for the devil. I can’t even begin to describe the path I had to travel to get back to being something even approximating the sort of person I might ordinarily have been, or the years it took. As an adult I was once asked to describe my personality in a few words as part of one of those pointless personality tests that second-rate employers are so keen on. I said “It’s the best I could do with what was left.” That’s probably as truthful an explanation as it’s possible to give. On the plus side, I’ll never be an alcoholic. The early stages of inebriation are always pleasant enough, but then it shifts gears on you without warning, and you find yourself in a waking nightmare of hellish introspection; two or three hours of catatonic despair with nothing for company but dark thoughts and the relentless ringing of chronic tinnitus in my ears. Socrates may well have believed that the unexamined life was not worth living, but in my experience there are some things it pays not to look at too closely. Even simple things like a hug from my kids can pull me up short sometimes: as the wave of love for my children washes over me it makes me wonder why my father couldn’t feel that for me: what must have been wrong with me? I think back to his funeral, and how many people packed the place to pay their respects to a friend and colleague: surely they can’t all have been wrong about him? It must be me… But none of this has ever caused me any mental health issues. At the time I guess I was too preoccupied with surviving – just keeping our heads above water whilst the debt collectors queued up at the door until we were finally turfed out of our house – and I simply didn’t have the time to dwell on it. Perhaps I should caveat that by saying that for years my biggest regret was that medical science couldn’t bring my father back just so I could have the satisfaction of killing him with my bare hands. I’d genuinely enjoy that, although I realise it might not be a totally sane desire… Of all those who have posted here the person I identify most strongly with is Xtreme (apart from that bit about tucking into Edwina’s hairy pie, or whatever deplorable Welsh depravity it was that he was getting up to). My early experiences taught me in the most brutal way possible that life sometimes turns to shit in an instant through no fault of your own, that no-one has truly got your back, and that you’d better find a way to deal with it if you don’t want to go under. I came very close to not being here at all, so I’ll gladly take whatever life throws at me. I also lost my best friend some years ago in a horrific accident, and not a day goes by when I’m not grateful for the fact that whatever unpleasantness I may have to deal with, I am at least here to experience it.

Please tell me that's not a euphemism...

Perfecting clutch control on a bike is piss easy: just be a complete bellend like me and spend a day struggling round the CBT circuit without realising you were in 2nd gear the whole time, and after that your clutch control will be shit hot!

...or just some c*nt from Preston...

Ok whats the song ? Great song, great version. Mr Seger's choreography was provided by the David Brent School of Dance, and it features Peter Stringfellow on bass and a drummer that one of my session drummer friends calls "That twat Kenny Aronoff."

In the sea, surfing, or high on a mountain ridge ... my heart soars ..... Same here. I took a beat on the northern plains once, and found myself staring out at the Great Divide. As I was standing there, trying to decide which way to go - east or west - I saw a young hawk flying. My soul began to rise...

I honestly don't know why these companies make it so hard to get their prices - it's not as if the inconvenience is going to deter any competitors from getting hold of them if they were to put their mind to it. All it does is piss me off and waste my time, and doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the transparency and honesty of their pricing policy: I just imagine them sitting there trying to decide whereabouts on the rip-off scale they're going to pitch their offer. If any of my competitors were to phone me up and ask for a price I'd just give it to them. As they say: always tell anybody freely and openly anything they could easily find out by some other means.

Seriously, I'm getting really sick and tired of companies who make you jump through endless sodding hoops just to get a price for their bloody equipment. I've just requested a quote for a laser particle size analyzer for the lab, and when they did eventually get back to me it was to email me a list of damn stupid 'customer familiarization' questions. This is what I've just sent back to them: What types of material do you wish to analyze? Particles. What parameters of the material are of interest? Their size. How do you currently measure these parameters? By giving them to another lab that has a laser particle size analyzer. What drives your interest in this instrument? We need to analyze the size of particles. With a laser.

Load of fuss over nothing - I was fine...

I'm not sure what the soil is like to be honest: there's quite a well established garden with various fruit trees, so hopefully it's not just builders rubble! I've got two 5/8" rods with a coupler, which will get me down to around 8 feet. Would that be better than sticking two in at 4 feet and connecting them do you reckon? I guess it's really going to depend on the nature of the underlying soil...