The Chapman Zone Dave’s Blog

Even though I am officially boycotting Christmas this year, I have been feeling more festive than in most recent years this time around.

I guess it’s the combination of a few things. Boycotting Christmas has removed any obligation to prepare for the day and spend loads of money on people and food and stuff. Not that I had any money to spend, as the last bike payment came out this month, and it has been increasingly denting my already fragile finances for the past seven months.

I went out with the Scout Group to Sainsburys at Broadcut on Saturday, to do some bag packing to raise funds for the hut. It was nice to see everyone in the place quite cheerful, wishing us a Merry Christmas as they donated money, and seeing my Scouts working hard with no complaints, doing what is a particularly tedious task, some of them for six hours with only brief breaks. Added to which, we raised £874 for the Group. So that was a nice day.

I had a nice get together round at Pam and Ant’s place on Friday night, and Brian surprised us by turning up (he was delivering down at Pompey that night and was staying over). I also presented Pam and Ant with their wedding DVD (only two years late), and we watched it that night, and it went down quite well with everybody, which was a relief, as I have been rushing around for the past three weeks trying to get it done. I’ll come back to Friday night in a minute.

On a more personal note, I went to see the quack at St Mary’s in August about my digestive condition, and they gave me a mountain of pills to take. I didn’t take them straight away, as my acupuncturist recommended I didn’t (something to do with them being part of the aspirin family, and aspirin being bad for the blood), but I have been getting a little impatient with the progress of his treatment, so I started taking them a few weeks ago. I don’t want to tempt fate, and I’m not going to describe what changes they have brought about (because it’s a gross topic) but they seem to be working. I am not counting my chickens yet, as it may just be a temporary respite, but so far so good. Although I don’t let the condition get me down, it surely affects me mentally, and to see a possible end to the whole affair has given me a real lift. Like I said though, I’m not counting my chickens just yet.

Anyway, back to Friday night, and the most important part of this post. I’m not sure if I posted about it on here or not, but one of my friends, Pam, was diagnosed with cancer about six months ago, and was gearing up to the possibility of a sh*t load of chemotherapy in the new year, so we’ve all been really worried about her. On a small aside, I’ve done very little else except worry about her, and by that I don’t mean that I’ve done nothing else with my life for the past six months, but rather, I’ve worried, but I haven’t actually done anything to ‘be there’ for them other than go round there when everyone else does, and I’d like to take the opportunity to apologise for that - if I’d thought I could actually have done anything that would have helped, rest assured I would have moved heaven and earth to do it. The closest thing I could find was to get the DVD done, as I thought it might cheer them up a little.

Anyway, I digress (shock, horror…). Pam announced that she had an announcement to make (hang on…), so she provided us all with a glass of her home-made wassail (mmmmmmmmmm!) and stood up to make the announcement she had just announced that she was going to make. I was expecting the announcement to be along the lines of “I don’t know what the future holds, but……..” and so on (touchy-feely-bonding friend type stuff). You can imagine my surprise when she announced that she had heard the results of a CAT scan on Wednesday, and that it had revealed that the cancer had gone…

Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From what I can gather, she has been on immunosuppressants for most of her life, but she discovered recently that she has been overmedicated for much of that time, and this had contributed to the cancer developing. Since discovering the cancer, and this overmedication, she has been put on the correct dosage, and this has allowed her body to fight off the cancer.

This is the best bit of news I’ve heard for bloody ages and has really cheered me up (and, apart from worrying about her, I was generally happy enough about my life before she made the announcement, so I am really happy now!). It’s a real Christmas miracle!

So, in the spirit of the season, to all my family, friends, Scouts, Cubs and work colleagues, and anybody else I know:

God bless us, every one.

Or should that be ‘Bah! Humbug…’?

See Cornell’s post to see what I’m talking about….

As any of you already know, I have decided not to observe Christmas this year. I shall be holding a Christmas Party for the Scouts as I always do, and will be attending a get-together with some friends on the 22nd, and of course I will be taking advantage of the holidays to have a couple of weeks off work, but the 25th of December will be just a normal day for me - I shall not be doing the standard ritual of: presents in the morning, Christmas meal prep for the whole morning, eat meal, sleep, sit around all evening getting sloshed, etc, etc. I shall instead be doing one of three things:

1. Get on with my normal routine when on leave - catch up on projects such as Scout videos, band video, photography, music on the PC, split up with doing necessary maintenance down at the Scout hut to the stores and Scouters room.

2. Find some work for the day. I keep hearing stories that many businesses pay through the nose to get people to work on Christmas Day, so I may see if there are any opportunities to make a quick wad of cash (this one is unlikely, as I don’t really know where to look for this kind of thing).

3. Take the opportunity of a day free of obligation to settle in for a non-stop, twelve hour Lord of the Rings Marathon (I haven’t watched them all back to back yet).

Number 2 and 3 are unlikely, so I will probably be doing the first one. Many of you may think I’m a bit crazy for making this choice, but I feel perfectly justified, for the following reasons:

1. I’m not a Christian, and ever since I discovered Paganism I have felt slightly hypocritical about taking part in what is supposedly still a Christian festival, even though it has strayed far from this to become what it is today, which leads me on to:

2. What Christmas has become now is greed, waste, excess…..ok, maybe it has been that way for ages, and what is wrong with a little excess now again?

My problem is that the capitalist machine that has taken over virtually every facet of our daily lives has pushed the need to spend more, and get more, and consume more to a frenzy, and beyond. Yeah, it’s been that way for ages, but it’s getting worse, and it will keep on getting worse until something changes. As usual, it will take something extremely drastic to make us all sit up and take notice, and something catastrophic to make us actually change our ways.

Businesses may have made an absolute killing last Christmas, but the system insists that this year they make more than last, and then more the next year, and even more the year after, and so on - even if they make 1 billion profit this year, if they made 1.1 billion the year before, this year will be considered a failure. So they push us to spend more. They put more adverts out to persuade us that we need to spend more money to enjoy the festive season than we did before.

I saw an advert the other day (I can’t remember the product), where a wife freaked out at a husband (or left him) because he didn’t spend enough on his Christmas present to her. The gift itself was quite a thoughtful one, but it didn’t cost enough. Thing was, I was waiting for the punchline, to see that this advert was a joke, and that the real message was “it’s the thought that counts”……but none was forthcoming. The advert basically said that you measure your love for your partner by how much money you spend.

Kids are bombarded with adverts for more and more expensive gifts, pushing the level of expectation for Christmas morning to ridiculous proportions, expectations which parents feel under more and more pressure to meet. I imagine that as more and more parents are able to spend less and less time with their kids because they are both out working, they feel that spending more money on their kids makes up for this in some way. Many people get in serious financial difficulty at this time of year, and yet the corporate machine keeps on picking up speed, encouraging us to get deeper and deeper in debt to feed their insatiable lust.

The western world is infected with a sickness - consumerism. Christmas is now the epitomy, the zenith, nay, the celebration of that sickness. It’s getting worse each year, and I don’t want to be a part of that particular aspect of it.

3. If I ever have a family of my own (by that I mean get married and have kids), I am sure that I will start observing christmas again. Or rather I will observe a restrained version of it. Christmas is for kids, and one thing that the whole day’s ritual leaves me with is the reminder that I am not where I am supposed to be with this aspect of my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a perfectly happy guy (despite my ranting and frothing at the state of the world), and am content with the state of my life - I’ve got a decent stable job, I have a potential avenue to escape the rat race with the photography business that I intend to start exploring soon, I have the best unpaid job ever (Scout Leader), a myriad of different hobbies and interests that prevent me from ever getting bored, good friends who I can count on, and have a roof over my head and all the creature comforts anyone could ask for (within reason). The only thing I feel is lacking in my life is a place of my own, and a wife and kids to share it with. Christmas day is all about those things - watching your kids open and play with their presents, decorating your house, inviting people round, cooking the meal, and so on. People whom I have spoken to have been concerned that I will spend the day all morose and depressed - on the contrary, the day itself, doing all these rituals for the past few years has left me with a bit of a downer, and I am confident that by not taking part this year, I will avoid that.

So there’s my reasons. I probably have a few more floating around in my odd little brain, but I feel that is sufficient explanation.

By the way, I’m not trying to persuade anyone else to start boycotting Christmas - I believe that anyone should be free to enjoy it, as it can be a time for great joy, and likewise, I hope no-one will give me any unnecessary grief about my choice.

I got into work (particularly early for some unknown reason - I was in at 07:45), and was sitting at my desk fighting off sleep, when Chris (one of the PAs) came over with a card.

“You’re early! I wanted to get this on your desk before you got in.” She says.

“Oh. OK.” Says I. “What is it?”

“It’s a birthday card.”

“Oh. OK, thanks…………….Hey, it’s my birthday. Cr*p, I forgot!!!”

34 and the brain is shot…….

….that my good friend John is a total and utter tool.

Yes, the jury has returned, and the verdict is in. Let me explain what happened…..

I was at Cubs last night, and while I was inside the hut doing Leader stuff, John was outside having a cigarette. While he was there, leaning against my car, he had the spiffing idea of trying his key in my lock (he owns a cavalier like me). And it worked, so he unlocked it, and then locked it back up again (isn’t he a considerate fellow?)

“Hey Dave, guess what? My key opens your car!”

“Oh. Ok….”

I didn’t think any more about it, until the end of the evening when I went to leave. I put the key in the lock…..and couldn’t turn it.

It wouldn’t budge. Ten minutes of pushing and pulling and jiggling and teasing…..nothing.

No biggy, you may say, simply open the door from the passenger side.

I’m afraid not. John, while locking the car back up again, put the deadlock on. For the unenlightened Cavalier owners, a deadbolt is activated when you lock the car and turn the key another quarter turn, and it means that even if someone smashes your window, they cannot reach in and unlock your door - the only way to release the lock is with the key. And it only works from the drivers side.

I shouted for John, and he spent the next five minutes apologising and feeling like a bit of a tit.

I couldn’t stand there all day trying the lock, as I had agreed to drop a Cub off on my way home. In the end, I discovered that the boot can open independently of the rest of the locking system, so we had to climb in through the boot to get to the front seats. Fortunately I had already put one of the back seats down to fit some stuff I had to take to the hut, so that made it a bit easier.

So I was able to drop the Cub off, only about fifteen minutes late. Of course, he had to climb out through the window…

Anyway, Sarah suggested that I pop round and see Tiffy, as he usually has a solution for any mechanical problem. I didn’t know what he would be able to do, except jiggle the key around like I had, but when I considered the procedure I was going to have to go through to secure my car that night, and at work the next day until I could find a locksmith (climb out drivers window, go round back, open boot, climb in boot, close drivers side window, climb out boot, lock boot)…. I thought I’d better give it a shot.

Tiffy, bless him, was up in his attic playing with his train set model railway (sorry Tiffy) when I called, but he came down and helped me out like he always does, and with a bit of graphite powder and then WD40, and a lot of wiggling and jiggling, the key finally worked. It is a little temperamental now though, and I have to be a bit gentle with it, but it works!

So that was another charming little interlude to an otherwise uneventful evening.

On the plus side, it did give me something to post about on here….which is nice!

Five days into December and not a single post…

“Why, Dave?……..WHY?????” I hear your collected cries.

Well, I’m a little busy at the moment, and not with Scouts (believe it or not).

No, currently, I am sitting next a printer that is churning out copy number 78 (ish) of the Pancake Eating Freaks new demo, Peephole.

Ooh, hang on……copy number 79 is now being printed.

Anyway, after I have printed the discs for the first hundred, I will copy the master onto each of them (hopefully not burning out my DVD writer), then I get to stop……..

……until tomorrow that is. I am currently awaiting a delivery of supplies (CD cases and photo paper) from SVP , my preffered supplier of blank discs and cases. Then I get to realy put a strain on my printer and print the covers. I doubt I’ll get a hundred of those done with my remaining ink, so I will have to shell out more dosh to get some more.

I am actually taking a day off work tomorrow, as the parcel was delivered today, but no-one was in to collect it (Dad is away this week), and I really want to get these demos done, or at least enough of them to satisfy sales and get Simon enough to start dishing out to venues and promoters at least.

So that’s what I’ve been doing with my time. Oh, that and a few other projects, which I cannot speak about just yet……

Hmmmmmm……………mysterious!