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Not that I need validation of my parenting efforts from anyone other than my daughter herself (and especially not my mother , I went to my daughter’s first parent’s evening at school (instead of pre-school) and heard the words that I wanted to hear and made every last second of the last five years worthwhile.

Every nappy and wet-wipe; every hissy-fit; every temper-tantrum; every sweet little moment which nearly makes you weep; every gurgle; every deep conversation about the cat dying and going into the stars; every scribble, drawing, painting and stunning work of art; every random creation which you don’t understand but proves creativity and imagination without bounds; every little thing which shows that your baby isn’t one any more; all of these things and so many more validated with three words:

“She’s doing fine.”

Kick-ass.

They say you should never meet your childhood heroes, probably as your memory (or more acurately, your perception) of what they were like back then is quite different to the person they really were or are now.

While strictly not a hero of mine, I’ve always liked Gene Wilder, principally for his role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory but also for the film The Woman in Red (Kelly LeBrock was a bit of a childhood crush of mine, especially after Weird Science), so I was actually quite excited to sit down with my five-year-old to watch Charlie.

So a little later, after enjoying the film in the same way I did about 25 years ago (the film itself is 39 years old as I write this), I pull up Gene Wilder’s Wikipedia page (link up top) and was a little shocked at the picture of him they have there:

Gene Wilder at a book signing in May 2007

That is most definately not my memory of Gene.  My memory of Gene is as I saw earlier, that of his most famous role:

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Time may heal all wounds but it makes fools of us all at the same time.

I guess that may be one of the curses of the web: there is no nostalgia any more.  All your childhood memories of cartoons, people, TV adverts and so on can be called up with little effort and the bare facts laid out before you, ruining your rose-tinted memories. You can even (thanks to the demand for all things ‘older’) purchase most of the TV programmes you used to watch as a child for next to sod-all.

What truly concerns me is the reminder about my own mortality. Being reminded that my time on this planet is finite can send me into a nasty panic attack (not that there are any good ones). I know my time here is limited.  But I guess I’m not dealing with it very well, especially after the recent hard reminder with the death of our cat Fingers. I start to worry if I am making the most of my life. Then I get doubly worried about my child: am I raising her to appreciate the time she has? Oh shit, her time is finite too…

So now I’m thinking morbid throughts about not only my owm mortality but my daughter’s, my wife’s, my parents’, my friends’… “Life. You’ll never get out of it alive…”

I’m already 32. While that’s not old (not to me anyway) I still think of myself as ‘young’.  But with better glasses. And worse hair. Sometimes it’s odd and not a little scary to realise that I am twice the age of the new students at the college where I work.  TWICE their age. Glad I’m not 16 any more but the realisation’s a shocker.

A friend of mine who I really should stay in closer contact with, made a decision years ago which saved his life.  (This goes back to 2002 or 2003 so the details are a little hazy.)  He spent some time in Nepal (as he does) and had the opportunity to get an earlier flight back to the UK.  He came to the conclusion that one extra day in Nepal is preferable to coming home early.  I think I would have come to the same decision!  Well the earlier plane he would have got on crashed into a mountain with no survivors.  He didn’t find out ’til later.  To tell me this story, over a coffee on Park Street, Bristol, he pulls out a printout of the BBC News webpage with the story on it (can’t find it now).  He looks me in the eye and says, dead seriously,  “You’ll be dead a lot longer than you’ll be alive, Vaughany.” No shit.

So, Have you Googled any of your childhood ‘heroes’ recently? I strongly suggest you don’t. Or do it quickly, to get the viscious mortality hit, before you waste away.

Warning: this is a yucky post dealing with death and (mild) gore, and is not at all VLE or I.T. related.

Last week, I saw our 9-month-old kitten run over, twice in quick succession, and lie spasming, dying on the road.

Not a good start to the week.

Fingers, named by my four-year-old, was a loving cat but none too bright. I’d seen her nearly hit about a month before (and who knows how many times it had nearly been hit that we didn’t see) and you just know that a cat with no road sense is not long for this earth.

So I collect the body (still desperately trying to think of it as a cat, not a corpse) from the road and bring it back to the house, not realising that my 4yo was watching from the lounge window. She’s waiting for me by the door as I arrive and she’s obviously seen what I’ve been doing. I cover the  head (seriously, NOBODY, not even me, needed to see that) and ask my daughter if she’d like to say goodbye to Fingers. Understandably she declines.

She’s sad all day, and the next day and for about the next week she gets really sad when she realises she’s “forgotten” about Fingers (her words). So, to remind herself of the good memories, without any prompting from me or mum, she pens the following (and asks for a little help with the words):

A happy memory of our deceased kitten Fingers, drawn by my 4yo.

She dealt with the grief her way, by remembering the happy times and realising it as best she could with the tools at hand.

So despite having to wash blood off my hands (not a metaphor) and doing a lot of not-very-manly things, I now have a reminder of Fingers which puts a smile on my face, thanks to my 4yo.

Buy a car. Use it.

Moved house: ex-landlords being, well, daft; broadband still not sorted out after well over a month; doing anything over mobile broadband on a poor laptop is painful to say the least.

Updates soon.

I have a little more faith in my fellow human beings, and it’s all thanks to science-fiction books.

I get through a lot of sci-fi, because I read for pleasure and I get a lot of pleasure out of the fantasies and escapism which sci-fi provides. The downside is that I now have a kind of “vendor lock-in” with just three authors (Banks, Reynolds (who recently signed a £10m, 10-book deal), Hamilton) whose work I enjoy and have read, re-read and re-read again, so I have nothing new to read by these authors.

It is my intention to read a lot of ‘early’ sci-fi, of the Asimov and Philip K. Dick eras, but I find this harder going than more modern sci-fi, so I thought my luck was in when totally by accident I stumbled across a promising new (to me) author who I had not before heard of and whose books I had not read. The author is Kevin J. Anderson and the books were the Saga of Seven Suns.

Well, five of  them.  The last five.

I saw the five books at a local car boot sale. They are well presented and in good condition, and the rear covers described the sort of story I wanted to read, but the first two were missing. “No bother,” I thought, “I can pick up the others on eBay.”  So I paid for the five books and left.

But the chap I bought the books from said he had the others at home, and his wife (nice passing the buck there) didn’t pack them, so I went back to him, brandished a green beer token and asked him to post them to me. Call it an exercise in human decency. I stood to lose, well, a fiver, which I had already saved several times over by buying five books for £2 when the RRP is about £8 each, and I stood to gain two more books for £5 (or so, after postage and packaging) which, again, woould have cost £8 each in the shops. Whatever the outcome I was quids in: five books for £2 (saving £38 of the £40 RRP) or seven books for £7 (which is nice, considering the title and number of the books) saving £49 of the £56 RRP…

I suppose I always knew the last/first two books would turn up, judging from the well-to-do, easy-going nature of the chap I entrusted my hard-earned cash to, but I wouldn’t have even considered doing that back where I used to live in Somerset.  Maybe I’m not giving the people there enough credit, but I think I know the people and the place well enough not to trust even a penny to someone I met 10 minutes ago.

I love it down here.