My parents tell me I was three years old when I had the surgery to separate the two conjoined fingers on my hands. Just 'googled' this [Disclaimer - other internet search engines exist and may provide different results!] and I can't find the technical, medical term for it.
Basically, the third and fourth fingers on each hand were joined together at birth. Not as one digit or anything too serious, but giving the appearance that they were 'stuck'.
Quite a delicate and lengthy operation but it was a great success, particularly on my left hand though the fingers do turn in towards each other a little. I have scars and some 'webbing' but no-one has ever noticed this or commented. It means that the upper knuckles of these four fingers don't really work (not independently at least) and I have problems with arthritis in the joints which is painful in damp weather, but I have rarely experienced any difficulty as a result of either the con-joining or the surgery.
Perhaps the worst thing is a noticeable shaking in my hands if I ever hold them still…

There are photos of me with my hands in splints during family holidays ( mum screaming at me to keep my hands OUT of the sea!) in Norfolk and I used to have lots of physio, but I don't remember any of it.

The holidays of course I do remember for these are indellibly etched onto my conscience and form an integral part of who I am in lots of ways.
For years and years it was North Norfolk, specifically the PineWoods Caravan Park in Cromer where my mum's parents kept a caravan. I didn't stop going there at least once a year really until I moved down to Southampton, mum and dad themselves taking on a van just a year or three after nan sold up.
So many times we went there and I never stopped loving it.
Individual holidays have just become a blur, but as caravan design and technology have moved on I do remember it got progressively less exciting.
In the earliest days we had neither water or toilets in the van and had to fill up at a tap in the carpark. Hot water came by boiling this up in a kettle to wash with, and the toilets were in the carpark too. The gravel was always pointy and cold, and the loos themselves poorly lit and inhabited by spiders!
Seems a lifetime away now with underfloor central heating and showers etc (mum and dad have a van in yarmouth now, but I haven't seen it) but this is probably only going back thirty years or so.
I recall my parents frustration at my lack of enthusiasm for joining in the games with other kids on the site, and the year my sister forgot her cuddly dog "Scraggyneck" and cried for hours and hours when we realised.
Once too, mum and dad between them forgot the keys to the van. have to ask them how that was worked around?
So Cromer, with its crab boats, rockpools and pier will always be a special place for me. Trx and I have only been a couple of times and as I write this I'm thinking how few holidays we take now, and certainly not to the same place twice. Mum and Dad's van in Great Yarmouth is simply not big enough and much too far away to be practical anymore, and the journey holds little appeal to my sedentary self.

We did take other holidays, and I do remember quite clearly being at a Holiday camp (aaagh!!) on the Isle of Wight during the Long Hot Summer of '76. Related this at cell very recently but details are blurred. Also week long breaks in Rhyl and Weymouth are somewhere in my head. There were donkeys at Rhyll I think?
We also once went to a cottage in Wales owned by a friend of my grandad's, at Dolwydellan in Snowdonia. Seems I forgot to take any notice of this when we went there last year with church!!

All this suggests to me that I will struggle to think of much that happened before I was about ten or twelve with any conviction. Maybe I should accept this and declare that for me at least, life began in 1976. I have documented evidence of this, marking the start of a hobby that shaped most of my free time for the next twenty years.

March 11th, to be precise. My first 'field notes' written up in a wire-bound notebook after a visit to Pitsford Reservoir in Northants, where I cycled thousands of times to indulge a passion for bird-watching.

Write here, write now.

I can remember the times when my sister was four.
"Leave me alone, I'm only four" was her catchphrase, whenever we told her she couldnt join in with our amateur productions, put on in the garage for our cringing parents' entertainment.
This, by definition, I was seven.
Can I remember nothng before I was seven?
My great uncle Fred, my nan's brother on my dad's side, used to come for lunch with us on occasional Sundays. He drove one of those blue 'invalid; carriages. I have no idea how mum and dad managed to get him from the back door (by the driveway) into the dining room, so I can only assume he had a wheelchair. I know he had a dog. Nipper. The dog bit me once, but without asking my parents I can't remember how old I was at the time.
This would have been at Uncle Fred's house in Norton Road, Kingsthorpe - one or two streets along from Bective Road where I went to school.
Lower School, as it was then. I don't even know if it's still there, but it exists forever in a song I wrote called "An Earlier Man" and here in Southampton, in Bitterne Junior, a similar aged red brick building with those beautiful tall narrow windows.
he bought me a football shirt once.
I can't remember whether it was Everton of Nottingham Forest.

Don't read back, don't edit this stuff. It could be intensely personal.
A biography is emerging, starting by itself from an idea I've had for years.
Impulse, no direction.
Press and play.

So I have memories of being at Bective School. The playground.
Mr Beint. Baint? I got knocked unconscious once, playing football with a tennis ball and banging heads with someone challenging for the same ball. Lorna Williams.
She wasn't the person involved, but perhaps I have just brought up the name of my first love. She was taller than me - it goes back a long way.
So how old was I at 'Lower School', when education was a three-tiered affair. I suspect it was 'Juniors', so that is now Key Stage 2, between the ages of about 7 and 10. Then we moved up to 'Middle' School.
No, I'm confused.
The 'Middle School' I'm thinking of was in fact Kingsthorpe 'Upper' School, where I would have started in the third year aged what - 13?
My playground memories are not as early as I thought, because Bective Middle School had that playground, that teacher, and that girl.
Which also suggests that I haven't much recollection of myself much younger than seven.
The facts inform me that I started school at Whitehills when we lived in Barley Lane, but other than my three cousins living nearby in Clover Lane I remember little of that time. One name comes to mind - that of 'Nolly' Osborne who features later in the story for altogether different reasons, but I know we were at Primary School together.
Even with visual triggers I can't imagine being there. Biscuit and Kink now live within two minutes of the school that sadly means nothing to me.
We moved from Barley Lane before I was old enought o remember living there.
Childhood will always be Liddington Way, Trudi B, games of "Stony", and those weird but ridiculous shows we put on a handful of times in the gararge.
This is the garage that was joined to the side of our house, about eight feet behind the back door. The garage that once had double wooden doors, painted green, that my dad forgot to open once and drove his Beetle into.
Was that the white Beetle? I need to ask.
He came home in so many different cars from work I have forgotten which one we actually owned

This is fabulously disjointed.
I have no idea where Iim going.

For a period, it was a white K70 (and Wikipedia informs me they were produced by Volkswagen between 1969 and 1974) and then his pride and joy was a classic "Jeans" Beetle, a limited edition also from 1974.
But again, by 1974 I was eight years old.
Does this suggest that my children will have no recollection of this contemporary period of their own lives? Alice, at eight, might now be experiencing her 'earlist memories'? Scary thought.
I am struggling to relate any pre-school experiences.
It was to Bective Middle we were walking, up that alleyway off Chalcombe Avenue, when Mum slipped on the ice and broke her wrist.
we had ice in those days.
Proper slippy stuff. Not the kind that comes in boxes with interlocking parts that you can take up and drive off with when the sponsorship deal ends.
At the back of the school was a great slope for sledging and pushin gyour mates down.

Mum will tell affectionately of the incident involving the 'twin tub' that my sister fell into and scalded herself so severely we had to take her into hospital.
Angie was proabbly two then? I 'm getting earlier, but this is a second-hand memory, relived through my mum.
That' s not what I'm trying to do here - I want to look back with my own eyes into my own memory.
It was all just so spectacularly ordinary.
Which is why I will never be famous. It's my destiny.
Read any biography of any musician/artist etc and they will relate tales of hardship, of life experiences, of abuse, of broken marriages, of hostility or tragedy.
I have no unhappiness.
Perhaps that's why there is no indellible imprint on the back of my eyelids?

My parents were neither poor nor wealthy. Neither clever nor ignorant. They didn't experience success or failure to any great extreme.
It is a little alarming to think that, when I was seven - which seems to be where I'm starting from - my parents would not have quite been in their 30s.
I was 18 when my dad celebrated his 40th birthday, for instance, and to my eternal shame I know nothing about it.
My excuse, which now seems sad and selfish, will become clear. The blanket of 'self' was impenetretable at the time.
I can remember all manner of cars sitting on our driveway. Apart from the various beetles, there were often 'Mercs' (my dad's delusions of grandeur) which were customers cars he was test-driving at the weekend or home for lunch, or occasionally showroom models of the latest models.
He loved (and still loves) cars, far, far more than I don't understand them. My interest and passion for automobiles is the very antithesis of my dad's - which again I think is to my eternal shame and must have caused him more than some frustration and grief over the years.
We have never talked about it.

He's Old School, my dad. Just like everyone else's, of course.
Again, the 'nothing unusual' programme.
Took a job as an apprentice mechanic at a small privately owned garage when he was 14. Worked his way up, slowly and insignificantly, through reception and into parts. Cars cars cars. How many hours did I spend out there with him, on his back, lovingly explaining how to line all the bits up so you put them back in order; the best way to bleed the brake system and change the pads??
And yet it means nothing to me. Which must be disappointing for him.
I'm assuming. I wish I knew.

Things have got a little complicated at the forum, and for the first time I think I feel very aware of having crossed the threshold into the 'inner sanctum'.

Since the first in November 1993, with Richard Skinner I think, F*xx has recorded five sessions for the BBC.
Skinner 1983
Batten Foster, Long 1985
Long, Robinson 2006

And in the meantime a repeat of the Long 1985 session on 6Music for Jane Gazzo in 2005.

Somehow or another, I have recordings of all 17 songs performed during these sessions. Copies on CD of cassette versions of the earliest stuff, and top quality CD versions of the same, and then my own downloads of the last two.
How come I am the ONLY person that has these things?????
For obvious reasons, BBC copyright quite understandably prevents the circulation of these recordings, and for othe reasons it cannot be seen that the 'official' channels endorse the trade.
So I cannot put inot the 'pot' my new CD containing all these songs, under the working title of "F*xx in Session at the BBC", because that would break all kinds of laws and ethical codes.
Perhaps one day there will be an official release of the same.

The dilemma is that, with two at least maybe three people, I have an understanding and feel an obligation that all material we come across will be exchanged between us.
But now a CD is doing the rounds containing the first three sessions, which is inevitable but has nothing to do with me.
And I'm getting emails asking why I won't pass material on.

It's a difficult one, and I sympathises with RH is his lonely world.
I stand beside him.

In the meantime, Baggins is woken.
Again.
Gorgeous and all that, but I do wish she would sleep.
And Dream of Sheep

An hour in the South Western tonight discussing the music of brel, Aznavour Almond, Walker and Kraftwerk with two guys whom I intend to swap material.
So refreshing ot meet people who understand.
I can feel a 'Heart on Snow' moment coming on...

I'm still working at this random piece.
Working title - Fast, she can

You tell me…??

Bending quickly, gracefully animated, the woman reached to pick up the book, its scattered pages dancing on the current, but as the shadow of her hand fell on them and her fingers touched the pages, they began to dissolve. To crumble. Into dust. Beneath her feet, the ground was covered in the finest deep sand, the dust of millions of pages, eroded by mourning, loss, frustration, jealousy and greed. These emotions swirled around in the water on an invisible tide, carving both disfigured sculptures of rock and the most delicate corals where tiny coloured fish sparkled like precious stones.
Where did the light come from, that cast the shadow?
The distant sunlight, slowly filtered through the greenish water, illuminating the myriad organisms that hung there like motes in an empty room?
Or some forgotten moon, white and cold? Was it day or night?
A lantern perhaps, swinging on magnificent ironwork outside a shoemakers, squeaking in the soft twilight breeze?
Breeze. She remembered the breeze on the hills. And as it came to her mind, so she could feel it again, in the moving water.

This year , this week at least, seems to be whizzing by at a furious pace.
We are so busy at work that things are falling behind schedule left right and centre. Finally got the accounts reconciled today and signed off the Hampshire Top Attractions leaflet, which ooks impressive.
we also have the 2007 Pocket Guide and Hamble Valley Visitor Guide going ot print this week, alongside The Hamble River Directory.
I've taken on the role of 'responsibility' because we need more editorial time, QA and someone in-house to sign things off.
There's a real buzz around when all five of us are in.
But I have to tell Ian very soon that we won't be using him for leaflet distribution after this month because he isn't quite doing the best job. Jo's taken that over from D (so it will be better organised!) and she quite rightly feels Ian's talents are best employed helping me out with the carto.
And at the end of March, she's arranged for us to take in our first 'Work Experience' pixie from B-P college. One of us will have a problem with that given they struggle to have any respect for anyone...

Tx is out tonight and I was out at a PCC last night.
The treasurer is resigning at the AGM. I can't do it. I'm too busy, and anyway I have doen my three years and must take a compulsory break from it this year. I'm hoping to get Tx to stand in my place.

While it's quiet at Foxx-world, I'm trying to keep ahead of the Media Archive and get a few interviews together. I keep turning up new ones online (two since the weekend) and I'm at the moment trying to get a trnascript of The Hidden man interviews finished.
What fascinates me is that this is (was) an easy-to-get album at the time and all fans have a copy. So they will have all heard the interviews.
And yet still they post at the forum asking questions that Foxx himself answers in the interview on THAT CD!! Hello?
Currently in some debate about the radio1 sessions. I have summarised all three between 1983 and 1985 with set lists, which of course now means that people are asking me a) how I know that stuff and b) whether or not they can have copies.
I'm all for trading material, but I'm less comfortable with putting rare tracks into general circulation for no return.
Mean of me I guess, but I got the things I have by trading most of it, and I'm usually more generous so this is my stand.
Trouble is of course, there are only a handful of people that have as much material as me now, and very very few things exist that aren't somewhere behind me on the shelf, so being able to trade is difficult.
What's also rather irritating is that, for the last two years, I have been recording all the sessions, interviews, Radio features etc of the 'net to add to the official archive and it seems that NO-ONE else does this??
As soon as something is broadcast, i can guarantee half a dozen emails requesting copies. No offer of trades tho...
I used to reply:
"You can get the software here, its a free shareware download" implying that people did their own copies. Now I don't bother. They just won't.
But I still thinkit's kind of illegal to share it recordings like this anyway, so there!

Went to see this film last week sometime for Tx's birthday.
People are right generally in what they say about it.
I've read and enjoyed the book and so found the film disappointing.
It always it.
But, being slightly more objective than that (I can accept that it's a different interpretation of the story and it has to work on a different level etc etc), I don't think it was even desperately well made and really 'dumbed down' for a wider audience.
Started off well enough - very graphic birth scene! Perhaps a little too much and set Tx off on the wrong foot to enjoy the rest of the film.
But it too quickly gets really corny and cringe-making once Grenouille starts on his killing spree in Grasse.
Before that, Dustin Hoffman is OTT and caricatures M. Baldini rather too much.
Alan Rickman is very good at being Alan Rickman.
It's sinister and beautifully shot, but these little suspense.
Where it starts to go wrong is in the depiction of the girl's bvodies once they have been killed. I don't really see how or why G would have moved them all BACK to the place he killed them. Or was that just so the director could have some dramatic nudes?
The scene where G 'smells' Laura and her father miles ahead on horseback is quite ridiculously bad CG, and then I lost patience with it during the orgy scene.
It's MUCH too slow and I felt embarrassed for the director watching it. It goes on for EVER and really adds nothing to the film, to the point where it actually detracts from it.

And that weird retro scene at the beginning, where G is led from his cell to be read his sentence in front of the jeering crowd?? It doesn't even happen like that later on, so the point is what exactly?

Perhaps I expect too much.

Perhaps this is why I don't go to the cinema very often.

One day, someone wiull see the advantage of making a film or a TV programme that is brave enough to expect that its audience at least have a brain cell EACH...

Without, the town turned around. Within, hidden music began to play (Track 4 - Previously unreleased). A sweeping curve of sound lead her into a vast submerged cathedral, half fallen, where the rusted shells of abandoned cars lay neatly, as if parked, along the aisles. She looked up at a gargoyle, but didn’t see his goatface, and the book she was carrying fell from her arm.

??

We had our first ever 'planning' meeting today.
Long overdue.
We have a lot to do to improve the way things run and many procedures to introduce or improve.
Vital if we are going to surive this year intact and get the infrastructure right.
Seems they want me to be in charge!

There is clearly a need for someone to do some management stuff.
It's a bit Heath-Robinson at the moment.
I want a few days off next week.

Write a quote Monday and then disappear for a couple of days into Wife's World. It's a calmer, strengthening place.

I want also to explore that passage I wrote.
Now playing:

Abbatoir Blues by Nick Cave.
Birdsong album of the year, 2004

God rides high in the ordinary sky

Weird.

I get twice as many hits when I don't write for a few days.

Re-purposing film
So I can see re-purposing film happening in a similar way to the way sampling developed and changed music and made a new form of music. Or several new forms of music in fact - Acid House, Hip hop etc.... To such an extent that it’s become integrated into all music. Even heavy metal music uses sampling, for instance, so I think, from now on, film-making’ll get a bit like that and go out into all kinds of other areas. You see it beginning to happen…you see it beginning to happen even on TV where comedy is using clips that are re-voiced and re-edited from existing programme formats and I think the surreal use of it will… be very interesting when people start to use it, not as an artistic medium so much, but as an extension of the media that’s around now. Have fun with it, in other words.
Making new films by cutting up and re-editing existing ones.
There’ll be a hell of a lot of copyright problems, just like there was with sampling music, but eventually everyone will realise that it’s to their own benefit to get involved with that thing.

I walked into the office this morning, and this fell out of my head.

Four hours passed.
It was nearly seven.
"Who the Hell is Jimmy, anyway?"
A woman, unknown to date, entered the room. In the years it took her to pass from the door to theblackened window, a forest grew. Trees emerged from the carpet, but not from seedlings. Rather the tops appeared first. This is perhaps best achieved with some kind of CG.
She stepped into the lake without pausing, moving with a slow, deliberate grace until the water swelled around her white dress. The staircase she followed led down, and as she disappeared under the surface she began to sing. A song of longing, of beautiful and unrequited despair, in a language understood by no-one but the singer, yet common to the many tongues of the fish that moved behind her eyes and between her legs.
An engine roared, and sirens. Emergency vehicles screamed their egocentric best "Me me me, Look at me" and flashed blue lights into the faces of those who dared to look away.

I've been aware of the need to find something to take along to my first meeting with CBs writers group on Wednesday, but I don't think at the time I really had anything in mind.
Treasure often comes From Trash of course, and I'm glad I chased this idea as it blew down the street .

The first CD of the year was waiting for me. The demos from The National Parks and a handwritten note from Luke thanking me for my enthusiastic interest and kind email.
Haven't playe dit yet.

Too busy whittling about my business partner's totl inability to follow any kind of instructions. Not from me, not from clients and not from our staff. he really isn't a great team player.
On friday's 2007 Planning Meeting I need to present some defined 'procedures' that we need to follow in putting our booklets together. At the moment, there is a serious lack of management going on. We are driving from the front, and our customer focus is rather blurred.

We've spend the day at Beaulieu. Cistercian Abbey, Palace House, National Motor Museum and all that.
We're not big on visiting major attractions, and this is usually the kind of place that is out of our league. It competes on a national level with millions of visitors a year (the largest Attraction in Hampshire by all accounts) rather than the more local places we are used to visiting.
At work, we do a lot of business with them, and they are great supporters of our cause - the visit today (for Elsi and Tx birthdays) was courtesy of a complimentary family ticket sent as a thankyou for the Cruise Terminal installation we arranged a few months ago.
I'm really glad we used the ticket to visit, because we have never been before. It's REALLY expensive to go in otherwise ( family ticket being £48.00!!) and to be honest, ahving been round now, it is over priced and disappointing.
These places often are I think?
While we enjoyed all three of the major sites - the cars, the Abbey and Museum, and the house - there is a general tacky kind of shabbiness about the place that was, admittedly not helped by the steady rain all day. Only one block of toilets, no ramps for pushchairs/wheelchairs, a hugely overpriced restaurant that served crap food.
Cold fish and chips and tea that costs £1.30 a cup!
The vinatge bus ride was too short and really needs bus shelters to at least mark where you catch it, let alone shelter from the rain.
The car collection is seruiously impressive and there are some beautiful machine sin there (my own favourites being any of the black rovers from 1920-1930 and the Rolls Royce Phantom. As well as Dietrich's auburn of course!) I found the racing cars and speed cars less interesting but Stan and Alice loved these.
BUT it all seems quite cramped, and more like a showroom than a museum. You only get one view of most of the cars (from the front) whereas I think it would be better to have them all much more spaced out and some isolated so you can at least walk all round them.
And as for the James Bond Experience, well that is really quite a let down and reminiscent more of a 'cheap' them park than a nationally famous collection. The film clip loop is terribly short, too loud and too small to see properly.
By far better is the Cistrecian Abbey and Museum of Monastic Life, but this was rather spoiled by too many Other People in there, and many of those being less respectful than I would recommend.
The house is wonderful too, but of course more of a challenge for young children. Portraits quickly get boring.
But that's not a problem, because obviously they are trying to cater for all tastes and ages which must be very dfifficult.
I think anyone between about 13 and 20 would find this whole place uninspiring, and even Flo at 10 said she didn't really enjoy much of it.
We can't understand why they offer a season ticket for a year when you can see all they have to offer in two visits.

So disappointing really, if we had paid. There are other places within the same distance that offer much better value for money and generally more Visitor friendly services.

It's a fascinating journey, this Drift.
Over the holiday period I put together the annual 15 album mp3 collection (only three copies this year) which for 2006 I have called Driftin' , this being a play on John's lyric for 'Metal Beat', a reference to the album of the year by Scott Walker and a description of the way the current takes me along the same stream but into different pools of discovery.
Lead me to wondering quite what I would be listening to this year, and purchasing Mojo has given me a couple of ideas. There are some fascinating new ambient/experimental electronic albums out there, but it was the review of Movies that made me play this again and started me really thinking. Czukay describes how he used recordings of voices from distant, unknown radio stations instead of a singer, and how he picked up a bass guitar and start playing along to dialogue.
Fascinating stuff, which was brought more sharply into focus today when I got around to listening to Radio 2's Berlin - Soundz Decadent programme this morning. Interviews and anecdotes from John foxx interesting of course, but even more so was the input from Blixa Bargeld, Klaus Dinger of Neu! and the very wonderful Ute Lemper.
I am absolutely intrigued by the whole Krautrock phenomena and love the way it all weaves together to form a beautiful picture of intelligent music in a ten year period that seems to have influenced so many artists during the last twenty odd years. First stop then will be Low and Heroes of course, and who knows where we'll end up from there.
Even more interesting was the way this programme analysed why Berlin was so influential in the 1970s, referring back to the emergence of cabaret in the 1920s. This is another genre that I enjoy, but it's so far been hard to reconcile with the other material. And here was the link. The link is the social.economic and cultural development and decline of decadent Berlin. Berlin. Lou reed, I believe.
Something else to check out.
Seems to make perfect sense now that also over Christmas I played my one and own Kurt Weill compilation. His work with Brecht is worth looking into as well...

"Seems like I forgot to steer…"

Should have been a landmark day for the company today, with all FIVE of us in the office for the first time. Mel turned up for her first day and West duly arrived, jetlagged but looking well at 10.30, and it would have been a full house but for Jo calling in sick.
Not bad, after just one day at work after the holidays.
For the first time, her abscence today annoyed me a little and I questioned whether it is 'right' of us to keep letting her take a couple of days every time she splits up with her boyfried,
Seems to be the way their relationship goes, and this is the third time in her year with us that this has happened.
And apparently (again) it's permanent this time. Third time lucky, perhaps?
So should I keep on letting her have sick days for this?
I think so, and it feels OK, but how regular is it going to be? She doesn't actually take much other time off, but as Mel put it today, it's 'unusual in her experience' to justify this kind of thing as sick leave.
Not so sure.
Weird to think that this time last year we were wondering if we could afford to take on Jo. Now we have two part timers as well and still enjoy a five-figure bank balance.
So so busy too. At least three big new jobs to quote for with mapping, the cruise terminal media campaign to launch and three VGs going to print this month.

Spent some time at the sales at lunchtime, mainly to exchange Tx Christmas coat for one two sizes bigger so that she can wear fat jumpers underneath? Huh?
There was me thinking a big coat would eliminate the need for fat jumpers?
And surely it needs to get cold first anyway...

Hey ho. Her birthday next week so I'm looking for other reduced clothes.
And LC is three on the weekend . She's so excited she's waking up at night.
That's for the first time ever, so things do get a bit fraught here lately.

Picked up Mojo today. Why is a mag on sale at the end of December called a "Febrauary" edition??
Interesting review of Movies - Holgar Czukay by John, which is what I bought it for, not to mention the very average review of From Trash. Fairy nuff though - it is a very average album.
Great free CD with this issue - the first magazine I have purchased for several years.
John was on Berlin - Soundz Decadent on Radio2 last night so I'll pick that up and record it on the interweb tomorrow in the office.

This is the latest idea that passed through my sleepless brain a day or three ago.
I've been on the net ages, and most of the forums I can find specifically for fathers seem to focus on a) Americans and b) rights in contact and divorce issues.
All very well, and valuable resources/comfort zones/ranting rooms etc, but I've been thinking a little beyond that.
Given my reflective nature this time of year, and an increasing awareness of my age (???) I have noticed that more often than ever recently I have been contemplating ways in which I can give somehting back to others based on my experiences. I feel a need to teach, advise, support, write about, publish etc SOMETHING.
This applies to work (more of which another time), discovering a faith (more of which another time) and being a dad, which is what I'm talking about now.
I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, but I am aware that in a lot of ways I have experienced more than is perhaps 'average' for a bloke, and in my typically stoic way none of it seems a Big Deal.
After all, I'm just me. Stuff happens according to God's will, and somehow we deal with it, using whatever means He provides.

So what I'm going to look into is the idea of setting up a forum for dads to talk about being dads and share experiences wider than those identified at the top of this entry.
Here's a quick summary of what's come into my life so far:-

¬ Two daughters born during a loveless relationship with an unstable 'activist' who has issues, sections and convictions.
¬ Separation by choice from those girls for about eight years.
¬ Re-integration of children as independent adults into a new family.
¬ Marriage, self employment and five more children.
¬ Practical hands on parenting because
Being a Dad is something you DO, not just something you are

¬ One son among six daughters, one of whom (thinks she might be) gay
¬ Water birth, home birth, hospitla birth
¬ Christianity and vegetarianism
¬ Failed vasectomy and post-operative pregnancy
¬ Partner's health and complications with contraception.

Just a few things to be going on with...

And its a New Year.
Thank God for that and all it will bring.
I am still 'clean' too, which is refreshing and lifts me daily. Not always easy, but several months have passed and I look forward with hope for stability and spiritual growth one the back of this as well.

Cool. Now where was I?

Couldn't have arranged a better start to the New Year than the cracking weather this morning. So crisp and clear, witht e first sunshine for a couple of weeks.
We decided to walk from Swayling along the Itchen Navigation up the the High Wood Barn for tea and cake. About a mile and a half through the Nature Reserve, muddy and quiet. Reedbeds, skidgy bits, grassland, puddles, streams and bogs.

They all absolutely loved it and got completely filthy - which is great to see.
Mud is SUCH fun!
I should have been suspicious that we weren't going the right way by the clean and shiny fencing alongside the Itchen Way, which now runs along the old canal but doesn't connect to the Country Park at the Barn for several miles further north!!
Walk alongside the overgrown canal for a while and then the path turns to the right alongside the M27 for about 200m until it meets the river. Turns left here under the bridge (great for echooooooooes!) and then goes back on itself for a similar distance alongside the motorway again returning to the canal.
BUT - immediately you come out under the motorway there is a stile leading onto the meadows alongside the river, where the path just meanders out into the fields and is pretty much unmarked. This is the way to go, noy as we did along the Itchen Way back to the canal.
Although there is a stile about 500m north along the Way into the meadows, you will find yourself wanding throuogh the marshy bits following streams until you come to a fence along side the river. The bridge at this point (in use four years ago!) has collapsed and there is no crossing point. Annoying, because you are less than 200m from the cosy High Wood Barn at this point and tea beckons.
We had to turn back, and by this time the kids were tiring and, after chocolate buttons, elected to go back to the car. All in all about 2 miles.
The trick is to check the f*kking map on the information board before you even GET to the motorway, which clearly shows the seperation of the Itchen Way from the Water Meadows Nature Reserve. OK, it doesn't show all the fences or the derelict (dairy lea!!) bridge, but had I bothered to read this first we wouldn't have even got to that point.

Nevertheless, a beautiful refreshing walk on a winter morning. Fieldfares, and tits in abundance, but noticeably no wildfowl and actually only a handful of thrushes. It's not nearly cold enough - the children insisted on taking their coats OFF halfway.

All exhausted now and its p*ssing down again, so we're drawing Flanimals, designing skirts and making a mincemeat lattice for dinner.
I'm well inot the 2006 Foxx retrospective I began some weeks ago, but I'm not sure when I'll finish it. Hopefully this evening
Almost impossible to believe the holiday is over and its back to work tomorrow,