I met up with some ex-colleagues on Friday night. I met them when I started my first job in Leeds for a company who shall remain nameless and I remember the time fondly. Not for the work, because that sucked. My timing was out as when I joined them there wasn't really anything relevant to my skill-set for me to do (they were a sort of consultancy / body shop / pimping operation) and I was young and cocky so I was a tad pissed off to be sitting around reading rather than working with shiny new technology.

However all was not lost. You see we had table football.

As soon as the clock struck 12 we'd surround the table and the banter would begin. At times I could barely stand up for laughing such was the quick wit of some of the guys. Even when not playing it was hilarious to watch two protagonists trying to win the game, and if not the game then putting off the other one. Oh, and of course fighting like crazy to avoid the shame of a 10-0 hammering.

There was the power player, the skillful one, the show-boater, the people's champion (who's always the moral victor), the shoot-on-site one and of course the lucky one (I hate lucky people!). They all know who they are! I was never much good at it but it was a lot of fun and better than writing another tedious white-paper nobody was ever going to read. It certainly served to get rid of some of the frustration of the job!

So we met up for the first time in quite a while as I said (we've all kept in touch but just don't together often enough) and it was a real laugh. Even though 4 years have passed we were right back there discussing the finer points of goading an opponent to lose at table football and such like!

There are some people you meet and for a time you're really close, have a great time and are best friends. But when that time passes and you only meet up now and then, it's never quite the same again as the shared experiences are in the past. Fortunately with these guys it's like no time has elapsed at all and we picked up from where we left off. I guess that's my definition of true friendship. You don't need to work together or spend a lot of time together, but when you do things are just back the way they were.

And you know, I'm sure I dished out a 10-0 hammering one time to Nige… I just bet he's blanked the trauma of that out of his mind – but I never will!  

I remember ABBA. Judith Wilson used to live along the road from us when I was a kid and when I was over at hers one day when she brought out an ABBA record. I’d never heard of them at that point and don’t really remember if she played the record or just looked at it (come on, it was 20 years ago!). But they clearly didn’t make an impression as I never made a point of listening to them again.

Sure, they were on the TV loads over the years, at discos, weddings, films and so on – it’s impossible to escape from them even now. I just didn’t pay much attention. So last year when I was doing some redecorating I picked up the ABBA Gold CD from my girlfriend’s collection (it was closest to hand), put it on and was hooked. I never realised what a great band they were! And even more surprising was that I already knew all the words and could sing along immediately. I instantly understood why someone once wrote a PhD on the music of ABBA (I saw a program on the BBC about it years ago).

I’ve been working hard on the next version of John’s Background Switcher (which is in beta, contact me if you want to join in the testing) and fired up Media Player. I wasn’t sure what to listen to so just picked the first on the list – which was 2 Unlimited. Since that was terrible, I chose the next which was of course ABBA – and once again I’m reminded how good they are! Excellent coding music borne out by some of the work I’ve spent the weekend doing – including the much requested anti-pants filter. One of my colleagues was doing a PowerPoint presentation and my background switcher had decided to select a photo of a pair of pants on a moor as his wallpaper, much to his embarrassment! So as of the next version you can put in a list of tags and no photos containing any of those tags will be chosen – so no more photos of random children on your desktop!

Now, if I could just get ABBA to reform and record some new material – I know all their songs already…

When I was a kid my mother would always try and catch my dad out on April Fool’s day. She’d wake him up with some piece of surprising news and generally catch him off guard so he’d quite often fall for it. In an ironic twist my brother would also try and catch my mother out – with a pretty high degree of success too!

Trouble is, when truly bizarre things would happen we’d think she was joking. One time she came in and said that a herd of cows was in the garden and we thought she was up to her old tricks but it turned out that a herd of cows really was chewing up our garden! They’d escaped from a nearby field – what are the chances?!

I had a bit of a sleep in this time since I was knackered and was woken up by my girlfriend bursting in at about 10.30 to tell me that one of her friends just texted her say she’d just won £100,000 in premium bonds. The way she spelled it out: “one… hundred… thousand… pounds!” made me realise she believed it, but my brain immediately started looking for reasons it wasn’t true and then it occurred to me it was April the 1st. I told her and the smile dropped a bit as she realised she’d been had, then started laughing. She had already replied to congratulate her friend!

When you lose someone close to you it’s the little things you miss. Sometimes you don’t think about it at all, and then a day like April Fool’s Day comes along and a load of happy memories come flooding back. If I recall correctly my mother actually fell for the BBC’s Spaghetti Trees joke of 1957 so she wasn’t entirely immune to it herself!

As I’m the wrong side of 30 nowadays Christmas for me is all about family and having some time off from work. Christmas (at least the present-opening side of things) is for kids in my book. I say that, but come Christmas morning I’m not exactly unhappy to receive a selection of interesting presents! The following are some of the highlights…

The Broons Annual (it’s a comic book)

The Broons are a working class family stuck in the 1950s who get up to all sorts of amusing and somewhat innocent adventures. They have 7 children, live in a tenement block, the mother does all the work and the father mostly goes down the pub or out fishing. It’s all written in Scottish so they say things like “JINGS! THERE’S NAE NEED TAE EAT SAE FAST YE DAFT GOWK!” and “MICHTY ME! THERE’S A MANNIE AT THE WINDAE! CALL THE POLIS!”. Every other year a new Broons annual is released and I’d eagerly read mine throughout Christmas day when I was a kid and it’d keep me busy. (Every other year they release Oor Wullie but I’ll save that for next year). My brother got it for me this year after a gap of many years so it’s like a trip back to my childhood! What’s strange is that it hasn’t changed at all, they’re still stuck in the 1950s, although the internet does pop up from time to time so they do have some of the modern trappings! Although my girlfriend can’t understand it as she disnae speak Scottish. I’m black affronted.

Some Tasty Snacks That Didn’t Last Long

I love flapjacks and anything that in any way, shape or form resembles flapjacks. I also like shortbread. And caramel shortbread, and tiffins and anything like any of the above. So when I got a box full of delicious bite-sized snacks it didn’t take me more than a few hours to devour the lot. They were lovely though!

Some Things To Make Me Smell Nice And Age Well

A collection of fine-smelling products like deodorant, shampoo and conditioner (what with the long hair) is fine, but now I’m getting older I notice I got some anti-wrinkle cream (I guess my good lady’s trying to tell me I’m not 21 any more). I’ll start to worry when I get presents including ralgex, foot powder and worse of all, Just-For-Men hair dye!

Coffee To Make You Smile

Regular readers will know I love my coffee and I also love my coffee machine. So I was very thoughtfully given some swanky coffee cups and some equipment to enable me to produce a more professional cappuccino like in the picture. Cool! What’s even cooler is that the smiley face remained all the way down until the cup was finished – just like a good pint of Guinness!

Alias is like James Bond (played by a very attractive woman – Jennifer Garner) crossed with Sunset Beach (insane story lines episode after episode, each crazier than the previous one). It’s fantastic and unfortunately I missed the start of Season 4 of the show so decided to wait until they reran it. No need as I’ve now got the box set courtesy of my brother! We’ve watched the first 9 episodes and it’s still as amazing as ever – and that Jennifer Garner gets sexier by the season…

Some Excellent Macadamia Nuts

I love macadamia nuts. I’d eat them all the time except Britain is the worst country in the world for quality food. The French PM is absolutely right when he says the UK has the worst food in the world. It’s terrible. However you only realise this when you travel abroad and try other food then come home to what they pass off as tasty. The only time I manage to get good macadamia nuts (among other things) is when I’m in another country or there’s a French travelling market in town. So it was with some surprise that I opened these ones and discovered that they were definitely up to standard! As a result they didn’t last very long… But at least I know where to get more.

Anyway, that’s a quick list of some of the nice things I received this year. Much more than I deserve but what can I do? Now, onto the New Year!

The highlight of my weekend was undoubtedly attending one of my oldest friend’s weddings. I say oldest but I really mean longest (he’s the same age as me after all). It was a fantastic day, the bride looked amazing and he brushed up pretty well too. It was set in one of the most impressive castles I’ve seen (Menzies Castle) and it was really nice to see people I hadn’t seen in years. But almost overshadowing the day for me were a couple of things I found out…

Back at school 4 of us were really good friends. Myself, the groom and the two best men at the wedding (yep, two heads is better than one) – I’ll not name names to protect the innocent. Anyway, I moved down to Yorkshire 6 years ago and we didn’t see each other as much although I kept in touch more with the groom than the other two. They both got married (one 4 years ago and the other a year later) and I didn’t get invited. I didn’t think anything of it and despite being invited to the stag do for the first one I didn’t mention not being invited as I didn’t want to make him feel awkward. It was in Ireland so I just assumed they couldn’t invite everyone they wanted and as I’d moved away they’d moved on and that was fair enough.

When the second wedding happened a year later it was brought forward a few months for unforeseen circumstances and again when I wasn’t invited I just assumed that as it was a rushed job there wasn’t enough room, etc. I really didn’t take any offence, I’m not that sort of guy and I knew that weddings are expensive businesses.

When I got invited to this wedding we were one of the first people to accept. So it was with some surprise that mid-way through the evening the wife of my first friend came up to me and started to have a go about the fact that I never replied to their wedding invitation! I wracked my brains for a while because I’d forgotten all about it but eventually we came to realise that I had actually been invited but had never gotten the invitation! I hadn’t mentioned it at the time because I didn’t want to make waves and for the last 4 years they’d thought I was a rude git for ignoring them. I felt terrible even though looking back there’s not much else I could have done.

Still feeling bad about that can you imagine how I felt when the wife of my second friend came up to me and started having a go about the fact that I didn’t reply to their wedding invitation either?! That wedding was fresher in my memory because my mother was ill around that time and I distinctly remembered not being invited – but again the invite had never made it to my house. I couldn’t believe it. All these years the reason I hadn’t stayed in touch with two of my best friends was because of a simple misunderstanding. I’d just assumed they’d moved on in their lives whereas they were harbouring a grudge because I’d spurned their wedding invites. They’d thought it was out of character for me (which it absolutely was) but didn’t pick up the phone at the time so we never knew. Sort of put a dampener on the evening really (but not too badly).

Well, the lessons here are when you don’t hear from someone you invite to your wedding, phone them! Secondly, don’t trust the Royal Mail – people still steal mail and especially if it looks like there’s money in there (I guess a wedding invitation can look like a birthday card). Also, I’ve got a second chance to stay in touch with two of my oldest friends and their wives and that’s a chance I’m going to take.

What with all this job hunting, football playing, redecorating, net surfing and TV watching I’ve been doing lately I felt I needed a few days rest. I did this by driving back to my father’s house and staying there. It’s a big, quiet, relaxing house and the one place that I can feel truly at peace. I spent a great many years there growing up and all the happy memories from that time are there. It’s a quiet neighbourhood in a nice little village and it’s only when I go back that I realise why my parents settled there in the first place. It’s a really nice part of the world.

The relaxation starts as soon as I hit the motorway heading north. If I head south the roads just get busier and busier until it’s a standstill (I’ll write an article about why all lorry drivers should be killed another time) but northwards has the opposite effect until I’m driving all on my own. I set my cruise control to 90 mph and never needed to touch it all the way home – there just wasn’t any traffic (it’s okay, I did slow down for roundabouts).

I visited some friends and their son (who is 1 already, I can’t believe how time flies), I went running around my old playground (Tenstmuir forest), watched some films, listened to some music and just recharged my batteries. I also had a bit of fun getting the cat to chase around a laser pointer (all I’ll say is I’m glad I’m not a mouse, the cat’s reflexes are incredible). Anyway, back to job hunting and interview preparations…

I just noticed that exactly two years ago to this day I published my first entry on this site. It was a short description of the fact that I’m Scottish and I live in Yorkshire. When I wrote the article I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with this site. I’d read Joel On Software and liked the format of his site and thought it would be an idea to create something similar so that people I knew who lived elsewhere could see what I was up to without having to send them e-mails from time to time. I guess it was laziness, experimenting with the web medium (I used to be a web designer and had left that firmly in the past) and perhaps a little bit of exhibitionism. Plus I’d never managed to write a diary longer than a few days so it was a challenge.

Well, much to my own surprise I haven’t become bored with the whole idea and given it up. I don’t know what you – the reader – think of the site but from a personal point of view it’s been interesting to write about things on my mind and document some of the good and bad things that I’ve experienced in the last two years. If you were to ask me why I still write this site I’d struggle to give you a really convincing reason, it’s just become a part of my life and I accept that and don’t feel the need to really understand why.

Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate myself on sticking with it through thick and thin. I may just carry things on like this for the next two years. I might write more technical articles. I might even start posting darker, more negative articles rather than just deleting them. Or I might get sick of it all and wind it up like I thought I’d do in the first place. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. Happy birthday to John’s Adventures!

If you were to make a film about my 20′s (maybe when I’m long dead and you want to chart my rise to power) there’s one thing I can tell you right now to ensure a certain degree of realism and accuracy. And that would be what music to play throughout. It would be the collected works of Belle and Sebastian.

They’re a band from my home country of Scotland and I can still remember the first time I heard them. It was from my personal music advisor – my brother. He had a copy of the album The Boy With The Arab Strap and was playing the track Dirty Dream Number Two and I was instantly hooked. I bought my own copy of the album, then a copy of the previous two albums, then all the CD singles (they’re always EPs with more tunes on them) and then I kept a watchful eye out for any new releases. I’ve played all the CDs to death but I still love them and whenever I change the CDs in my car I almost always have one by Belle and Sebastian in there.

The thing I love most about Belle and Sebastian is that all of their tunes are the sort you find yourself walking along a road humming the song to. They’re amazingly catchy – if you’ve seen the UK sitcom Teachers you’ll have heard the title track to The Boy With The Arab Strap and must agree how once you’ve heard it you can’t get it out of your head. They’re all like that! Each one feels like a journey rather than just a song – you feel like you’re actually going somewhere throughout. They can seem quite twee while being both uplifting and depressing at the same time with some clever lyrics and the old trick of negative lyrics with positive music.

Anyway, I was flicking through the music channels on TV last night and came upon this song. I liked the sound of it and watched the video. The premise was a guy who’s an athlete and is getting pulled in all directions by his coach, his girlfriend and the band he’s in. They all want a piece of him and he just seems to be caught in the middle bouncing all over the place. I found the song really catchy and watched intently to see who it was by. And guess what? It’s by Belle and Sebastian and I didn’t even twig! A quick call to my brother to say that they had a new single revealed that in fact they’d released an album back in October while I was in the process of going to New Zealand / losing my job / moving into a new house. Five minutes later and I’d ordered it from Amazon – it’s called Dear Catastrophe Waitress.

I still remember driving around to job interviews back in 1999 listening to The Boy With The Arab Strap over and over (and singing all the way). So here I am five years later and I’m going to be doing exactly the same thing with their latest work – how’s that for symmetry? I’ve only got 7 months left of my twenties which is plenty time to play the new album to death…

Thom Yorke once said that the most important thing in life for him was heart-felt communication with others and it’s something I strongly believe in too. Come 50 years from now I’ll most likely be dead. Buried six feet underground in a few planks of wood. A headstone saying something like “Here lies John Conners, may we all rest in peace as he won’t be publishing to his website any more!”. From that point of view the only things I can have achieved that will make any difference is the lives of those I affected along the way. We all tend to adopt personality traits and attitudes from those around us and pass them on to others. So in a small way the fact that you’re reading this may change you in an almost imperceptible way which you may in turn pass on to a few other people and by remote control I’ve affected them without ever meeting them or having any contact with them.

I find it important to put a bit of effort in to maintain friendships with people I care about and connect with. But it’s hard. Especially when you move away from them, or they move away from you. Sure, there are plenty of people that I wouldn’t mind never seeing again – most of the people I went to school with for example (whose names I have long since forgotten) – but there are many that I do. The trouble is time. It’s very difficult to maintain any meaningful contact with all the people I want to, and I mean more than sending a Christmas card every year. When I go back to visit my family in Scotland for a weekend there are a lot of people I’d like to visit, but with just 2 days and my father and brother to see, there just isn’t time.  Fortunately some are en-route so I can drop in on my way past but there are others who I promise myself “I’ll call them next time” but never get around to. It’s something that pains me from time to time, but I know it’s a part of life.

There is a consolation however.

Take Gary Douglas for example. He was a chef for the hotel I worked at during my student years and he’s the man responsible for the fact that I love mountain biking. He dragged me all over the country and over seemingly impossible climbs and descents and introduced me to the joys of the adrenaline rush. I’d never been interested in mountain biking until I met him and I’ve never looked back since. He moved down south to Birmingham and while we stayed in touch for a time he eventually vanished off the face of the earth, leaving no way to contact him. His positive mental attitude, love for life and desire to make the most out of it certainly rubbed off on me and if you’re a regular reader then you may see it rub off on you. I may never see him again for the rest of my life, but he changed mine for the better and though he may never realise it he’s changed the lives of countless people I’ve known and will know in the future. Not a bad legacy really.

When I mention to people that I’m from Scotland I tend to get the same old responses. The first is “I thought you were Canadian” which is a bit strange, but even Americans have thought this was the case. Another common one is a mention of that historically inaccurate film Braveheart and the classic line about “freedom!”. And another is a reference to caber tossing. This ancient Scottish sport involves getting the largest telegraph pole you can find (a de-branched tree in the old days), picking it up by one end and throwing it upwards and forwards with the intention of it flipping over and landing it in front of you so that the end you were holding is now the furthest one away from you. The guy who can toss the biggest one and successfully flip it over is the winner. And it brings me perfectly on to this weekend.

I’ll be back home in Scotland and on Saturday I’ll be attending the Balloch Highland Games. These competitions date back to the clan days where rivals would meet and the games would be organised to keep both men-at-arms and camp followers occupied and stop them from killing each other with large, pointy swords as was the fashion in those days. The tradition has carried on to the present and is a cultural reference point for my beautiful country of birth.

If you want more Scottish culture than you can shake a stick at, then the Highland Games are for you. As well as loads of “look how strong I am” sports like caber tossing, stone throwing and sheep throwing (I made that last one up) there’s dancing, music, bagpipes (see how I separated music and bagpipes?) and everything else that seems stereotypically Scottish. I believe I’ve been to the games before when I was a kid but to be honest about all I can remember was the car park (I was probably far too busy trying to be the centre of attention all day to notice anything more). So as far as I’m concerned this will be my first time and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ll be bringing along my camera so I can record the whole thing in detail. Until then I’ll practice my Scottish accent some more (I’ve been living in Yorkshire for too long). Okay, basic vocabulary: auch (D’Oh!), aye (yes), ken (know), wee (small), dreich (cloudy day with spots of rain), dinnae (don’t), cundie (drain cover), dunderheed (complete idiot). Now string it all together: Auch aye, ye ken it’s a wee bit dreich the day – watch ye dinnae slip on the cundie ye dunderheed! For more information on the Scottish language, check out Scottish Words Illustrated.