Take the stairs

Tara has made me remember another thing this week. Speaking of how she influenced someone to take the stairs, I was reminded of an advertising campaign I really liked by The British Heart Foundation, the campaign was called The Big Red Fight Back and featured groovy posters that were designed in an art style used for wartime propoganda. The one I was reminded of was about stairs being your friend, an image of the poster is above. I thought the campaign was a great idea.

Movies I watched this weekend

It's an older film now but I watched Re-Animator last night. It made me laugh with the over-the-top gore and silly plot. As a fan of gore horror, I enjoyed it and the acting was brilliant.
I also watched Girl From Next Door which starred Emile Hirsch and Elisha Cuthbert. In honesty, it was a film I watched only to see Elisha Cuthbert. It turned out to be quite different from what I was expecting and not in a good way. As the film closed I just thought what a wasted opportunity it was to have such a good cast and still to end up with such indifferent fodder. The cast looking great is about the only thing it is worth watching for.

Childhood memory

Tara's trespassing post reminded me of one of my earliest childhood memories, not about the act of trespass though.

It was in my pre-nursery/pre-school years so I must have been under 5. The airforce did recruitment open days every year in our town, they had a couple of planes, a mobile caravan and various other events and displays in an area of the town. My mum must have thought I would be interested to see a jet plane up close. They had two sets of narrow stairs up to the jet's cockpit and there were a lot of guys crowding in on both sides. Somehow my mum managed to get up the stairs carrying me and I don't know if I was a special case or not but she was allowed to sit me in the pilot's seat. Great! What a treat! Then it all went wrong for me. Seems such a silly thing now but the guys were all crowding around and were interested in the flight joystick, that's where their focus was - I think an airforce man was moving it around and telling the other guys about it while I sat quietly. Being an infant I was naturally curious, so as soon as he let go of it I grabbed hold of it. It must have been amusing because all the guys erupted into laughter. That cockpit turned into a pit of hell as all the attention turned on my young self. I was probably a bit frightened when they all started laughing and it was really laughing at nothing but my infant curiosity however I remember crying and wanting desperately for my mum to remove me from the cockpit. What should have been an enjoyable experience became something much less pleasurable.
It was an experience that has stayed in my memory for a long time. I often have to talk to groups of people for work, often times they are strangers to me and I have no problem doing that. I am in control and am confident. However, when I find I am suddenly the centre of attention in situations where I haven't been warned or haven't instigated it, I hate it. The simplest example of this is when I join a group of friends at a pub or restaurant and they are already there and seated. They might be talking and laughing about something completely not related to me but as I walk in and hear their laughter, my sensitivity is "are they laughing at me?". I am suddenly thrown into the limelight and I dislike it intensely - I much prefer to be part of the group from the beginning or walk in with someone else. We all have insecurities, this is mine.

It's been a while....

It has been a few weeks since my last update. I'm afraid a lot has been going on and it has mainly been all work related, hence the lack of time to look at blogs and blog about social stuff.

We're having a new fence in the garden this week. A nice man from the Czech Republic is doing the handiwork for us. I'm so bad at DIY that this was the best option to have the work done quickly, I usually take too long and end up not doing the job properly.

We have a long weekend here in the UK, Good Friday and Easter Monday. The weather has been a bit grim, grey and drizzly. My wife and daughter went to the seaside but the shops were shut and the weather defeated them. As I write this, they're currently on their way home. My son has been ill this week. So I stayed home with him, mainly playing Mario Kart.

This afternoon, I set up Twitter - you can read my Tweets just over there -> somewhere.