Categories
nostalgia

Things I Miss About Being A Kid

Sitting here, waiting to go out to buy Harry Potter 7, is enough to make me understand – if ever there was a mystery about it which for me there isn’t – why Harry Potter is SO great.

For adults I mean. Simply put – it makes us feel like kids again. Like Disneyland, swimming in the sea and…in my case, almost nothing else. (If you’re very good at things like surfing and skiing you probably get this feeling from that too, but last time I skied I was trembling with fear and then I snapped my leg across the top of my boot – and heard it crack.)

I miss being a kid, even though you’re relatively disempowered and have homework and exams, and you can get teased and bullied, I mean, there’s no doubt it can be tough, BUT:

What a great feeling it used to be to wake on a Saturday morning and know that beyond the hour or two of chores that you might have to put in, the day was yours. I used to lie awake in bed making plans which would go something like this:

1. Call for Eoin across the road.
2. Mooch into the village to buy sweets and comics.
3. Go to Eoin’s house to read comics (Roy of the Rovers and 2000 AD), eat sweets and watch TV.
4. Get ready to go watch Man United (if we were playing at home)
5. Drop by the sweet shop on the way to the bus to get supplies for the match.
6. Leave for Old Trafford around midday.
7. Get to the match early to get a good standing position, usually on the railings at the front of the Stretford End Junior Paddock.
8. Amuse each other with silly stories and voices (mainly Eoin’s)
9. Go home (hopefully triumphant but if not then full of mock-bitterness and disappointment)
10. Watch “Doctor Who”
11. Hopefully have a teenage babysitter of an evening, and persuade them to read to us from their totally inappropriate book of horror tales, or if a girl, to tell us about their dates with boys.

(A close second for a Saturday when United played away, was scoring some new William, Mallory Towers, Tintin or Hardy Boys books at the library, or trespassing in the garden of the nearby grand house.)

Ah. Days where you don’t count the minutes of time wasted, responsibilities ignored, calories and the effect of sugar on your teeth.

Well, I’m having one of those days today and the housework can sit there and my kids can Make Their Own Entertainment.

Categories
nostalgia

Oxford traffic locks down


Oxford traffic locks down
Originally uploaded by
mgharris

Why did my rare, one day away from my desk have to turn into a battle with the elements? From aquaplaning all over country roads this morning to being stuck in one of Oxford’s legendary total gridlocks…I’m 2 minutes from home but doubt I’m going to be there for 30.

On the bright side, it brings back happy memories of rainy summer afternoons stuck for hours on Mexico City’s Periferico.

I wish I’d gone to the loo. How true it is that ladies should never miss an opportunity to pop into the ladies.

Yes I’m driving as I blog this. It’s okay…it’s an automatic.

Crumbs.

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
nostalgia raves

Der Echt Nutella

It’s okay, I wondered too. Der Nutella, die Nutella, das Nutella? I didn’t want to get it wrong after all. Luckily, the InterWeb provides answers to these questions and more.

http://www.wer-weiss-was.de/theme143/article1542260.html#1542260

According to a Nutella FAQ, it can be any one of the three articles.

So…Der Echt Nutella.

Nutella is actually made by an Italian family company, Ferrero, whose skills with hazelnut and chocolate know no bounds. They also make the Ambassador’s favourite sweets, those exclusive Ferrero Rocher.

But the Germans embraced Nutella with a passion back in the 1970s (or even earlier), which is where I first encountered the yummy treat, living there for 6 months as a four year old. When we left to live in Manchester, England, Nutella was the pain thing I missed, for years and years, until it started to be available in the UK, sometime in the late 1980s.

I remember going with school to Germany and coming back laden with 8 bottles of Nutella.

I wasn’t being greedy. You couldn’t get it in England then!

I remember staying with my German exchange penfriend, the lovely Erik, and being super impressed when one morning at breakfast the Nutella ran out. And his Mum simply went to the larder and pulled out another! Who stores more than one jar of Nutella at a time??? The Germans, that’s who. They love it.

I have always strongly suspected that Ferrero make a special formulation for the German market. Their Nutella is the echt Nutella as far as I am concerned. It is more chocolately and nougaty.

My good friend DB bought me a jar from the German deli in London, to help me with my writer’s block. I ate a few spoons before going to bed last night. God it’s good.

I couldn’t be sure this early, but I think I sensed a flicker in the old story brain. Maybe it was the combined effect of the Nutella and having seen Harry Potter 5. I’ll have to eat some more, to see if it really works…

Categories
Joshua Files mexico nostalgia writing

Mayan site of Chichen Itza One of the New 7 Wonders!


Chichen Itza
Originally uploaded by
Aleksu

The results are in – it was the final days of lobbying wot done it!

The Mayan city of Chichen Itza has been named as one of the official ‘New’ 7 Wonders of the World.

The photo is one of Aleksu’s – a contact of mine from Flickr who takes gorgeous photos. He’s been urging people to hit the 7 Wonders Website voting for Chichen.

Chichen Itza was the first Mayan ruin I ever visited, aged 15, on a hugely memorable trip to Yucatan with my father, stepmother and three sisters. We were driven there on the slow dusty road from Cancun. Not by my father – who stayed in Cancun to play golf – but his chauffeur. This was before cars routinely had aircon. It was a sweltering August day – at least 45 degrees Celsius and close to 100% humidity. and the site was crowded – even in 1981 it was Mexico’s most popular archaeological site after Teotihuacan. My sister Pili passed out from heat stroke in the ladies’ bathroom.

We walked around the site in stunned, exhausted silence. I was nursing my usual sunburn and was in agony most of the time. (Sunblock didn’t work in those days; I always forgot to wear a T-shirt for a critical hour or so, for which I always paid in tears of pain). I tried climbing the main staircase of tht Temple of Kukulcan aka El Castillo (pictured above) and got about twenty stairs up before I turned around and had an attack of vertigo. I knew without a shadow of doubt that if I climbed to the top with my sisters I would have to be helicoptered down. I managed to climb back down those 20 stairs but my legs were shaking all the way down, even though I used the trick of descending on a diagonal.

I went into the tunnel in El Castillo to try to climb the Temple of the Jaguar that sits under the newer, flashier Toltec-influenced pyramid. There was a crowd of tired, hot, breathless tourists waiting patiently to ascend a tight staircase just wide enough to permit a line of people going up and a line of people going down. It was like a steam oven in there; everyone was being slowly poached. The skin on my shoulders felt like it was on fire. I took one look up that staircase and felt like I’d got as close to hell as I ever wanted to be. A wave of claustrophobia gripped me; I almost shoved people out of my way on the way out.

Chichen isn’t my personal favourite of the Mayan sites. I prefer something more Classic Mayan, with the Puuc or Rio Bec architecture, ideally in a more jungle-setting, like Palenque. However Chichen has two sites, including an older, Classic Mayan site which is Puuc style.

Chichen’s buildings are spectacularly preserved – by now all four faces of El Castillo are restored, when I first visited it was just two. This pyramid is precisely aligned to capture the sun on the sides so that it lights up triangles on the main staircase and the serpents head at the base. This happens only on the Spring and Winter equinoxes and it has the effect of creating an undulating serpent-of-light on the staircase. I’ve never visited then because the crowds at that time of year are insane. (There must be a Youtube video of it…I’ll check).

Despite the constant pain of my sunburn I was impressed beyond anything I’d ever experienced. I’d never visited any Mexican pyramids before, for some reason I’d never been taken to Teotihuacan (near Mexico City). I’d had a fascination with the Maya since aged 11 my father took us to stay at the Acapulco Princess, fashionable in the late 1970s/early 80s, and – I was told – built in the style of a modern Mayan pyramid (although the website says Aztec but still…) But to see the real thing, to experience something of that atmosphere, to imagine the citadel filled with warriors and priests, ball-players and sacrificial victims…was quite, quite amazing.

We returned late that evening to the hotel in Cancun. I went into the hotel bookshop and bought the shortest book I could find about the Maya. It turned out to be one of those Erich-Von-Daniken type books about ancient astronauts and their supposed influence on early civilisation. I lapped it up. I hardly slept that night.

If any of you read ‘Invisible City’ next February you will see just how far that day left its indelible mark on me.

Categories
nostalgia raves

Dotcom daftness again? Or is it real?

It’s the sort of idea that we used to talk about breathlessly in innovation centre coffee meetings with other Internet entrepreneurs, swapping stories of the latest daft idea to get a squillion dollars of funding. Not that the ideas we had weren’t daft too. My best conversations were with then Oxford graduate student Alex Straub, of the splendidly daft mondus.com (hey, I too was a believer once), who probably personally made a few million from Italian investors Seat Pagine Gialle before mondus went belly-up. Back in 1999 Alex and I would go all googly-eyed at crazy Internet ideas, the madder the better.

So here’s the idea – and it comes from a DPhil Biochemistry student at Oxford. (Hurrah for the biochemistry training – it’s so darned versatile!)

A website where you buy moments in time. Your first kiss, it’s suggested, or perhaps the moment you were offered a book deal. For $1 per minute you get to baggsy that moment and upload content which will be hosted in perpetuity, to share and share again with everyone in the world.

Thomas Whitfield apparently pitched this to Dan Wagner, himself a wily Internet entrepeneur, the guy behind the business information service M.A.I.D and then Dialog…and now the investment fund Bright Station Ventures, at a competition run by the Oxford Entrepreneurs. Instead of giving the £5,000 prize, Dan Wagner offered Whitfield and his associates access to the whole $100 million fund to develop and idea that I’m guessing they think will be the new Youtube. Wagner thinks that Designthetime (now known as miomi) captures the whole zeitgeist of the Internet.

Except…Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and all those sites on which we all frantically upload content to our hearts content…are free. What’s to stop Yahoo or Google setting up something like this, and not charging?

When the whole dotcom thing collapsed it did so largely because most of the new businesses had non-existent revenue streams, and were spending money much, much faster than they could possibly make it. The smart money flew away and settled on the few safer bets, like Google and Yahoo. So respect is due to these guys for building in a user-driven revenue stream from the beginning. But will people pay for this frivolity? It will be interesting to see.

I can’t see how this won’t be imitated. For one thing, what will I do when I discover that my special moment has been nabbed? Will I upload content for my second favourite moment? Or will I go to a rival site, one that’s quite possibly free?

I like being all sceptical, but deep down I really hope it works. It was a great feeling, the belief that a graduate student could spin a yarn and end up running a multi-million dollar business. I Googled Alex recently – he looks to be doing pretty, pretty fine.