Restoring the Synapses to Their Natural State

Right now, I would have thought my email inbox would be overflowing with complaints that I have yet to post the next part of my draft novel. This could be a severe case of gremlins munching their way through BT servers, possibly that there is a shortage of dried frog pills to sustain my loyal readers, or maybe that some people have yet to discover Part One.

Rest assured, I will be treating the world to the next instalment soon. Unfortunately, today I am in the mood to indulge myself by posting a few synaptic rambles.

The problem is that I got myself stuck on my soapbox about my ideas for ethical business taxation which led me to the UK Government’s Freedom initiative and the associated website. The good news is that I posted my ideas as an entry on that site (See Note 1). The bad news is that it has sparked all kinds of random synaptic activity and visits to strange websites in dingy corners of the interweb.

While I work tirelessly on this service for the community, my son and daughter (See Note 2) both watch The Sooty Show.

Before the election campaign started, I posted a blog about the need for hope and confidence. It is probably an indication about my inability to detect much hope seeping into the British psyche, that when the YourFreedom site initiative came along, I rushed into it almost as fast as a peckish Tory Cabinet Minister to the Murano (See Note 3).

You might not realise it from reading my ramblings here, but I am basically an optimist. It is just that experience has taught me that a healthy helping of cynicism and a warped sense of humour is required to counterbalance this (See Note 4).

My early experience with the site was not a particularly happy one. It was slow, rather bug ridden and lacked most of the features that I would expect to make it ‘user friendly’ (See Note 5) and supportive of a consultation and debate. The developers (See Note 6) had obviously not bothered to cast a glance at the concepts behind a wiki when throwing together the design. Such was the disappointment; it caused me to go into a state of mourning. As with every major disaster or national sorrow, I was so devastated, I felt the need to develop a conspiracy theory.

Still, with the persistence of the lingering odour of a kipper stuck behind a kitchen cupboard, I persevered and presented my idea to the population of the UK.

I waited. For some reason, probably software faults on the site, the population were not experiencing cartoon lightbulbs appearing over their heads. My entry wasn’t making headlines in the national press. Sian Williams wasn’t emailing me about joining her on the breakfast TV sofa (See Note 7).

Soon it was obvious, I needed to kill some time. I realised that wheels of government turn slowly. That the phone call from a senior civil servant, inviting me to present the idea to the UK cabinet might be a way off. So I decided to read some of the other offerings and offer up my views and the benefit of my wisdom.

Oh God, I wish I hadn’t. I could have just amused myself with humerous videos. The offerings on the site caused me to weep and hyper-ventilate in turn. What really depressed my and had me searching for the nearest user for a lend of his syringe (See Note 5), were the offerings from numerous small business owners.

Politicians tell us that the future of the economy is in the hands of small businesses.  If that is the case, then we are in real trouble. Those on the site seemed to have a very strange idea as to what their responsibilities as business owners  and (assumed) members of the human race actually were. Most made the Daily Mail seem like the Socialist Worker.

Thankfully, I am over that now. My daughter took a break from watching vintage children’s TV and pointed me to this wonderful, acerbic, YourFreedumb  blog. Having read it, I feel a lot better. My sense of optimism remains a touch dented, but thankfully, my cynicism and sense of humour are replenished.

My only regret being that I didn’t think of it first. Still, no matter, tonight I am off to a talk by Terry Jones on Medieval Lives – that should get the old synapses back into order.

Note 1: For all of you who have yet to see my entry on the YourFreedom site, post a wonderfully supportive comment and give it a high mark, be warned. There will be a test on the subject later and failure to obtain a pass will result in you being given detention and being deprived of chocolate for a month.

Note 2: For those who did not know, both my children are in their 20s. It is highly unlikely that I will be called upon to provide parenting courses.

Note 3: Yes, that’s right, £60 for three courses and I bet they don’t serve a decent pint of mild or provide bottles of ketchup and brown sauce on the table. Although Gordon Effin Ramsey would like to treat me to the full works, I promise I’ll write him a spiffing review on this very blog.

Note 4: So far, this mixture of raw optimism and my natural, exuberant flair combined with cynicism and an ability to laugh at the ridiculous has kept me out of the reach of men with large butterfly nets and avoided residency in a rubber room. The dried frog pills help too.

Note 5: Yes, I know that I am on record as hating the term ‘user’ when applied to computers. The term still makes me wince and brings images of a man without hope thrusting a syringe in their arm in the mistaken belief that it will provide a chemical induced salvation.

Note 6: I hope that none of my Merkin readership are giggling at the back there? You really shouldn’t be sitting smugly with the idea that such poorly implemented e-government initiatives are unique to us Brits. The company behind this, Delib, are also working with the US administration on  ‘crowd sourcing’ apps for among others, the Department of Homeland Security – not feeling so secure now, eh?

Note 7: Although I know now this is due to those gremlins hidden in the BT servers feasting upon my emails.

Just After You're Gone My Memories Sharpen

Before I whisk you away on the magic carpet that is “A Couple of Tenors Short” with part nineteen, I wold like to remind any Brits reading this that May 6^th is polling day in the general election. Before you lose yourself in the nightmare that is my imagination, please vote. I wouldn’t dream of trying to influence how you vote - just make sure that by applying your ‘x’ to the ballot you have made your voice heard about how you wish to be governed for the next 5 years.  

If you want to start this serial from the beginning you will have to make do with the original Part One, the updated version will be posted when I am sure that it matches up with my ideas for the plot.  

Should you be rejoining the story, or do not have the inclination to read the previous parts, allow me to recap.

After finding the man from the State Security Services in his kitchen, Inspector Glynn Jones is confused. Up until that meeting, he was convinced he was going mad, yet the security man suggested that he could be sane and the rest of the world is mad.  To add to his confusion, he has found himself married to Pippa Hucknell; found that he driving a rather chirpy, lime green Datsun Cherry that behaves like a puppy;  suffered numerous random wardrobe malfunctions; keeps re-growing a ginger moustache;  bet against his own station in the upcoming police light entertainment championships;  had run in with gangs of Buddhist monks; had one of his team hospitalised by the feral Girl Guides and found the camp Sat-Nav unit in the pink Mark III Ford Zephyr is developing a personality and cannot be switched off.

Then there are the strange cases he has to solve, the abduction of Archie McRamie, the theft of industrial generators, forged tickets for the Light Entertainment Championships, feral Girl Guides, the smuggling of illegal Macramé yarn, and a suspected murder of a ‘John Doe’ dragged from the Thames.

Since the case started, Doctor Wilkins, the famous TV Pathologist has confirmed the unknown swimmer drowned in the Thames after taking a large high tea. The Fruit Fancies of his last meal are being linked to Darrius ‘The Baker’ Kipling. Darrius works for Horace Adkins, the beloved Barbers Shop Quartet impresario who is presumed dead after a massive explosion at his Georgian Mansion which the local police have suggested was suicide.

After finding a copy of ‘The Cat Crowed at a Little After Two-thirty’ by Archie McRamie in which the main character appears to be Horace Adkins, he decides to pay the author a visit only to find that both he and Smithy had been there before but cannot remember anything about it. Not only does he discover the McRamie abduction, but that all records relating to the case have vanished.

Darrius ‘The Baker’ Kipling and Dunker Phil, another of Adkins employees, were observed with Vera Anne Adkins and Violet Ann Adkins, two of Horace’s daughters, visiting the offices of London’s premier trial lawyers, Witherspoon, Lewes, Grambling, and Witherspoon. Vera Adkins had gone there to instigate a defamation case, but her sister Violet arrived and talked her out of it.

Jones has had a meeting with his Superintendant and a man from the State Security Services who were very interested in finding out why this visit took place, but have told the Inspector that he will be disowned if his investigation results in adverse public opinion. The State Security man has also suggested that he does not believe the book is the cause of the defamation case.

Now read on...

When Pippa returned, she found Jones sat in the kitchen. The card from the priest was held in the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and he was tapping it against her copy of ‘The Cat Crowed at a Little After Two Thirty’. In his left thumb and forefinger he held his thick gold wedding band.

“I’m sorry I’m late, darling.” Pippa smiled and kissed him lightly on his furrowed brow. “I got an invite to this press launch. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Anybody who is anybody was there.”

Pippa continued to name drop and gush about the press launch while she busied herself laying up the table. Jones sat staring at his wedding band and continued to tap the card on the book.

With the table laid, Pippa opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses, all the time recounting anecdotes from the event.

“Is there something wrong?” Pippa looked at Jones with her head tilting to one side.

“Do you think I’m mad?” Jones looked up to look her in her gleaming blue eyes.

“Mad? You?” Pippa laughed. “No darling, you are not mad. Just appealingly eccentric.”

She watched him tapping the business card on the book for a few moments before adding “Why on earth do you ask?”

Jones let out a huge sigh and sat back in the chair. “Do you remember what you asked me last night?”

Pippa laughed. “I’m a little hazy on last night, darling. I was ever so slightly bombed.”

Jones laid the business card on the book, then adjusted it so it was parallel to the edge of the book’s cover. “You asked me if I ever got the feeling that I was in a dream and that something is stopping me from waking up.”

“Did I?” Pippa broke his gaze, took a swig from her wine and started to examine the preparations for the meal. “Well, we all feel like that sometimes after a bad day and I was bombed. This dinner of yours looks interesting.”

“Don’t change the subject, this is important.” Jones cut her off. “So you do feel that you are in some kind of dream?”

Pippa looked at Jones, the carefully put down her glass. “OK, yes, sometimes after a really bad day things can feel a bit out of control and a bit like a bad dream, but the feeling soon passes.”

Jones nodded. “Will you humour me by answering a really odd question?”

Pippa gave a nervous laugh. “Of course, my love.”

“Thank you.” Jones scrutinised the inscription on the inside of the wedding ring. “When were we married?”

“What?” Pippa’s eyes opened wide, and then narrowed, furrowing her brow. “What a strange question.”

“Please, for me?” Jones gaze left the ring for a moment to focus on Pippa before returning to the inscription.

“Well... errr...” Pippa took a big mouthful of wine. “It was a June wedding. Yes, it was June. June 6^th, 2009!”

As Jones watched the inscription of ‘25/07/09’ blurred and slowly reformed as ‘06/06/09’. Jones closed his eyes and exhaled noisily.

Wikimedodah

Simon Holder (born 13 May 1643) is Meritorious Practitioner of Murphy's Law at the University of Fotheringhay, a post for which he has drawn a salary for many years without anybody knowing what he actually does. Holder recently noticed that too many pairs of his trousers has taken to doing impressions of cheap hotels. A noted expert in alternative realities, it is rumored that he has discovered the means to escape the constraints of time and space, although he has yet to publish on the subject.

Contents [hide] 1 Biography 2 Education 3 Early Life 4 The 18th Century 5 The 19th Century 6 The early 20th Century 7 Dried Frog Pills 8 Evar 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links

// Biography

Holder claims to be born somewhere in England on 13 May, 1643. While being very insistent that the 13^th May is his birthday, he has nothing to support his claim to being the world’s oldest man. He has a brother and sister who are both over 315 years younger than himself, a fact he puts down to his parents discovering yoga and monkey gland injections in their twilight years. After school, Holder held short lived careers as a Forest Ranger and in Local Government before finding that computers have no discrimination towards reality hopping.

All of Holder’s theories on reality have been published on the internet. It was by pure chance that these were discovered by luminaries at St Wayne’s College,  the University of Fotheringhay, who offered him the chair of the newly formed Reality Studies school.

Education

Holder came very late to education, starting school in the 1960s. He attended a number of educational establishments where his teachers described him as ‘not all there’, ‘somewhere else’ and in ‘a little world all of his own’. The school reports from his early education are currently in a brown cardboard box in a very safe place to prevent competitor academics gaining access as they are believed to provide a clue as how he manages to slip between realities. After failing at a wide range of schools, he eventually finished his education at Devizes School, were it is claimed that the teachers occupied as many alternate realities as he did.

Early Life

Very little is known of Holder’s early life. A lot has been written in the media about the claims made by some embroidery circles that he alone was responsible for the Restoration of the English Monarchy. Holder himself claims that he had never met the women involved and that it isn’t his likeness in the engravings.

 The 18^th Century

Nothing of note happened in the 18^th Century, but it could be that Holder had a cold the day they did that in history.

The 19^th Century

Holder did military service in the 46^th Queens Hosiery. He entered in the ranks and after serving for 40 years in India and Afghanistan, emerging as the country’s most decorated major. This is mainly due to the relationships with the local embroidery circles. It is probably his exploits with the young embroiderers of Bangalore that would later be embellished by the Lord of the Evil Empire  to try and undermine his role as confidant to un-named member of the royal family.

After military service, Holder returned to London where he worked as osteopath to the stars enjoying affairs with many music hall stars of the era. His career reached it’s peak in 1894, but a scandal involving a young chorus girl, exotic fruit, two small lizards and a malfunctioning butter churn in a suite at the Ritz Hotel meant him leaving England to live the life of a hermit in the Balkans.

While practicing as an osteopath, he formed a lifelong friendship with Ethaniel Nightswerve, the brewing and embrocation magnate. This relationship lasted for many years and it is Holder who is credditted with providing Nightswerve with the confidence to set up his first brewery. Holder also invested £50 in the newly formed company and the profits from this venture is believed to have funded his early amphibian research.

The early 20^th Century

It is widely acknowledged that the authorities in Europe have hushed up that Holder very nearly prevented World War I. On the eve of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Holder was called to the Archduke’s private apartments and called upon to give him a reading of his bumps. According to Holder, he advised the Archduke he would be killed if he ventured out the next day. Official sources deny this saying that he was advised to ‘wear an extra vest in case he caught his death of a cold’.

Dried Frog Pills

With the Serbian Secret Service hot on his tail, Holder was smuggled out of the Balkans by a young Chief Inspector McCrindle Barleymow Honeydew-Fforbes of Old Scotland Yard. MI5, worried that Holder could destabilise the war effort, sent Holder to Peru. There he noticed the local custom of licking toads seemed to leave the population in a state of calm equilibrium with a very laid back attitude to life. After pairing up with a passing double-jointed anthropologist, he decided to perform an in depth study of the various amphibians and their therapeutic properties.

Due to a particularly energetic and long duration session of bedroom gymnastics with the aforementioned anthropologist, a set of toads put in the oven to warm, were forgotten. By the time that Holder returned to them, they had been reduced to a fine powder. A passionate argument ensued during which various substances were thrown across the laboratory, one of which, when exposed to fumes from Ethaniel Nightswerve’s Thoracic liniment,  caused a reaction with the toad. Subsequent testing showed that in pill form, the resulting concoction proved to be even more beneficial than the licking of toads and did not make the subject prone to tongue warts.

Evar

Holder is the mentor and agent to the Latvian downhill skier, Evar.

Notes

1. ^ Interview with a legend, Pippa Greatchest, The Guardian UK, 2002-10-16. Retrieved 2008-02-14
   
2. ^ Embrocation – The Recession Proof Investment, Harry Porten Lemon, The Financial Times, 2009-02-11. Retrieved 2009-03-06.
   
3. ^  Embroidery in Warfare. The Times Educational Supplement. 15 October 1997. http://www.the times.co.uk/news/arts/embriodery/scandle_in_needpoint.html. 
   
4. ^ Best 360 Evar!, The Sun UK, 2006-08-23. Retrieved 2008-02-14

References

• Therapeutic Amphibian Extractions   Dr Wilfred Clapman. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2005-01-13.
  
• Legends of the Yard, Socialist Worker, Magenta Poppet, 2000-10-12. Retrieved 2007-08-27.

External links

• The Official Simon Holder Website Website red1hols.blogspot.com/
  
• How to Embroider History Richard Cavendish looks at the role of Tapestry in Modern European History.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon Holder"

Who is that masked man?

Last night I spent most of my time fighting Microsoft's PowerPoint. It meant that I didn't get the chance to do much in the way of research.

Instead, I shall respond to the deluge of the email I received.

It is highly probable that if you follow my blog here (and here and here), that you may have come across the man of mystery.

Those of you who may not have yet adjusted to my synaptic tangents, you may feel that I am about to explain exactly who was that masked man, The Lone Ranger. As a pre-Clint hero of the Old West, he was allowed access to the chain of beauty parlours around the badlands of 19th century America that ensured that he and his trusty sidekick were always impeccably manicured. Faced with such clean shaven and well moisturised good looks, the hoards of bad-guys soon saw the error of their ways and surrendered to be rehabilitated into society. A society where all women were beautiful, young and even when besieged by renegades, could always smuggle in their make bags and find time to touch up the slap.

Our hero and his sidekick could always be relied upon to remain pleasantly aromatic and spick and span thanks to the secret material used to make their outfits that always remains clean and ironed no matter how many days are spent in the saddle. Sadly, it is a material that remains secret to this day.

But as usual, I digress. No, I am talking about that legend of blog folklore, Evar.

The historical timeline of Evar remains vague in my memory, but is rooted in the early days of my first blog on Yahoo. I started this on 30th May 2006. Rather like the Old West of the Lone Ranger, they were simpler times. I wrote my entries, posted them and experimented a little.

I started to explore the blogs of other people and the other features on the site - like I would encourage any 'newbie' to do. Above all, I got into a habit of setting aside some time every day to write a bit, read a bit, post a few comments and build up my network of fellow bloggers. The comments bit being the important bit as this built up relationships with people far more experienced in the art than I.

Looking through my old blog entries, I can see how my voice and style developed. As my confidence and network grew, I spent more time on the formatting (using HTML which eventually took longer than the writing!).

Evar appears to have made his first appearance in my blog on 21st June 2006, co-inciding nicely with Wimbledon and me suffering an apparent attack of bad taste.

Evar was born out of one of the features of Yahoo which was the short messaging system. People could type in short messages on the front page of your site. Along with an appropriate little smiley face, you could choose an emotion to go with your message. Lumped in with the obvious 'smiles', 'hugs' and 'waves' was one for 'Best 360 Evar!'

Somewhere, now lost in the mists of time, lay a conversation with Marcus Jordan (Yes, another Multiply refugee from the crumbling 360 megalith) over the delights (or otherwise) of these messages and somewhere in these it was decided that ‘Evar’ referred to an over competitive Eastern European winter sports specialist

Now, I am not at all sure how all of this came about and the actual conversation is now buried in the bowels of some Yahoo post that will probably never return (tags are great for finding individual posts, but sadly never updated to reflect comments).

I have another shameful admission. I can’t even be sure that I remember Evar’s full name. Somewhere along the line he acquired a girlfriend, Yvette Munsderpiedder, with whom he competed in the 2006 Wimbledon finals until a scandal forced Evar into hiding with the famous detective, Chief Inspector McCrindle Barleymow Honeydew-Fforbes of New Scotland Yard hot on his tail.

Shortly after this, Yahoo declared that I was interesting. Something that felt like a huge honour at the time, but take it from me, you don’t want to stay interesting.

Evar continued and the legend grew. Stories wove around him and characters wandered in and out of the blog. Everything based around the simple premise of my local shifted from Reality A to Reality B where it became reborn as the ‘Rat & Ferret’ all aided by Dried Frog Pills and Dr. Ethaniel Nightswerve’s Velvet Cudgel. He still gets the occasional outing of course, but I am careful that before I let him out in public, I check that nobody has sewn a new label in my underpants.