Tag Archives: memories

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Friday, 18th September 2026

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Nuggy is nine months old now and eating 2-3 solid meals a day. We alternate days in early morning care. Those two facts combined mean that I’m making him breakfast about 3 times a week. Today was omelette, half an orange and toast with peanut butter. He’s doing well on with allergens so far. All of these elements require some preparation from cupboard to plate (it’s shaped like an elephant’s head) and before strapping him in to the high chair there’s always some wiping down to do. It struck me today that I don’t think twice about doing all of this for him, but with my own meals, I rush, make the simplest thing possible, outsource lots of the prep and production and occasionally take small calculated risks with hygiene. I’m not going to stop putting as much care his way (I do know that’s not going to be practically possible before too long though) but it would be interesting to see how it felt to take as much care of myself – it probably wouldn’t include blogging at the breakfast table like this!

I’m thinking a lot about archives and memory. I probably always have been, but I’m more aware of it right now and making it a focus for some things I’m going to be releasing soon. Sometimes I think it’s all vain nonsense but I was encouraged today by seeing an ad for a movie, “The Arc Of Oblivion” – the ad got me because it features Werner Herzog reading Shelley’s “Ozymandias” aloud and if you can’t imagine how that worked on me then maybe we’re not as close as I thought 😉

That last sentence reminds me of something I saw about there being an Old English pronoun “wit” meaning ‘we two, you and I” rather than ‘all those here present’ or whatever. I love it. I will try to remember to use it at some point today.

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I was vlogging before you were born

I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.

It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)

We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.

Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.

I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.

I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.

If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.

What I'm doing

Granville John Davis

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My uncle, my dad’s little brother, died sometime this week. I hadn’t had much contact with him for some time, which I regret. He was christened Granville John and though in the family he was known as Granville, he preferred to be called John.

Because he travelled so widely, he was only around from time to time when we were growing up and my knowledge of his life is patchy (and could quite easily be inaccurate). As far as I knew, he was a professional full-time musician, playing tenor sax, primarily, but also clarinet & flute. I believe he started off playing in military bands while in the Army, then theatre (often for shows the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham) and cruise ships. He was also a keen amateur painter. His paintings were hung proudly on Grandma’s walls. I’m sure there was much more to his life than this, perhaps we’ll uncover stuff in the coming weeks. As he was away so much, I don’t think he really moved out of his parents’ home until they died. As a child, I remember many hours being allowed to pore over his insect and stamp collections when we lived just round the corner.

Though my father’s relationship with him was never hugely close, and musically, John was much more of a modernist, I have very happy memories of seeing them play together.

It’s a bit of a shock so soon after losing my last grandparent. John is the first of that generation in my family to go. It’s a reminder of how little time we have here and how suddenly things can change. I’m resisting thinking about death coming in threes.

What I've Been Doing

BCFC

I did some work today with some people who make football kit. I haven’t worn any football kit since 1981 when my Games lessons stopped being compulsory. But when I went into their archive room and saw some of the stuff they had there, I was transported back to the mid-seventies. In 1975, Birmingham City Football Club celebrated its centenary and a year later they replaced the early-seventies penguin strip with a plain royal blue jersey with white collar adding a two-globe centenary badge – I can still see Trevor Francis in that kit, before he betrayed us all to become the first million-pound footballer for that bugger Brian Clough.

Why did I support the Blues? You had to. No, really at the junior school I went to, you really had to. A teacher was spat at once for coming to school wearing a Villa scarf. A teacher. In 1975. Y’know, before Grange Hill, in the days when teachers commanded respect and could give you a good hiding if you didn’t buckle down. You can imagine what would have happened to any mere boy who dared even consider anything claret and sky blue.

Football shirts – social objects, pulling a trivial little story out of me, reminding us how we felt, creating the opportunity for connection. And that’s just for me, I don’t even care very much for football any more, what about the real fans? And then there’s the programmes and the magazines, and the boots and the letters and the photographs. These people have a delicious slice of our popular culture in their care, I hope they get to start blogging about it soon.