Remembering Mickey Bray - a true gent

Long before Jake was even a twinkle in my eye, we lost a great man. I knew Mickey Bray all my life, he was my dad's best mate and right hand man in his business. Of all of my parents' friends he was the one who I liked best and who always took time to talk and play with me. He never had kids of his own, preferring to keep cats, and perhaps that's one reason he and Jill, his wife, were so good to us. Christmas and birthday presents were always a bit special and they always made us feel a bit more grown up than we were.

We went to Disneyland as very young children and Mickey always recounted the same story about that trip. I think I'd just been on a gentle ride of some sort and was busy guzzling some red coloured drink when the American lady sat opposite us remarked,

'Gee, what a cute kid'

And that was my cue to puke all over her. Between them, my dad and Mickey must have told that story 50 times and it always made them smile. Of course I don't remember it but it definitely sounds like me.

When I was 11 or 12 we were living in a derelict dump on the corner of a plot that my dad was building our new house on. As a pre-teen it was an awesome place. We only lived in half of the house as the rest was damp and falling down in places. There were three or four rooms which were pretty scary places but fun to explore. There was no central heating and our back door handle was a toothbrush. My parents found it less fun for the two years that the new place took to go up and for the same reasons I wouldn't much fancy it now. There was the hole in their bedroom wall for one. Couple that with having to use the one room with a heater as lounge, dinning room, study and play area and you'll get the picture. There was one time (no, not at band camp) when the the electrics kept tripping out and we couldn't work out what was causing it. It continued on and off for a month or so until we realised it was the toaster. We'd been using the toaster on a daily basis ever since the electrics started to go. Eventually we found a dead mouse inside the toaster and I've not been able to eat raisin bread since.

There's no reason for telling you this other than to furnish my memory of that time. One Sunday afternoon Mickey and Jill came over to see my parents presumably for a cup of tea and a chat. Anyway I was outside playing and Mickey, a man who loved all things self built and mechanical decided to take it upon himself to build me a soap box car.

We spent the whole afternoon scouring the derelict garage for suitable items. We found a passable set of wheels from an ancient pram, a vegetable crate and along with other sundry pieces of wood, we (Mickey) put it all together and a fine feat of engineering it truly was.

The distance between old wreck and new build was around 50 metres and connected by a downhill stretch of flattened white chalk. Perfect for a soap box derby if we had a second soap box car which of course, we didn't. It didn't matter as my soap box car was more than enough fun for all of us. It actually worked and I spent the rest of the afternoon whizzing down the 'drive' and dragging it back up to have another go. Eventually, I crashed and it became a soap box write-off, sadly too far gone to justify a repair. But it didn't matter, that perfect afternoon is one of the clearest memories of my childhood and I'll never forget it.

In the mid-nineties Mickey, a man who never smoked and drank only on occasion, developed cancer. The cruelty of cancer is that it seems to affect those who deserve it least; those who have purposely put themselves at the other end of the asking-for-it spectrum sometimes still succumb to its indiscriminate clutches. Typically, Mickey fought it like a trooper, the bouts of sickness brought on by the chemo, endless therapy, biopsies, false hope, disappointment, every hurdle was met by a steely determination to beat this most horrible of plights.

A number of times when we all thought it might be beaten, the news came that it wasn't and eventually in July of 2006 it took him. He was very, very ill at the end and, sad to say it, I think the end was a relief for him. That he fought it so hard and for so long is true testament to a man who wasn't my uncle but who will always be my uncle Mickey.

His funeral was the day before we got married and the mixed emotions of that day and the one after are still palpable today. Although he wasn't there I like to think he was looking down and cheering Clare and me on.

Aside from my fond memories Mickey is remembered as something of a legend in the motor racing and hotrodding world. Always the tinkerer, Mickey raced Mini 7's and go karts and even built the original Pinball Wizard, a car he later sold to Keith Moon of The Who.

Below are a couple of links to the nice things people have had to say about this remarkable and universally loved man.

R.I.P

http://www.ampar.com/newsletteraugust2006.html

http://www.mini7.co.uk/downloads/07M7RCNewsletterV2.pdf

A lull

The word 'lull' usually conveys a negative sense of not much happening. As if a bad thing. In this case the lull is exactly what I was after. I remember writing shortly after Jake's palate operation that I wanted the next year to zip past. Not that I was wishing away my time, but that years only tend to go by in the blink of an eye when nothing much happens. To clarify, again, I'm not saying I don't want anything to happen, but I don't want to change jobs, move house, get married, have a baby or take a baby to hospital again for a long time. Just some normality.

I'm even done with holidays; Clare and I always live for our trips to Spain but, having been away with Jake 3 times this year and separately once each on our own, it's nice to be able to enjoy now without having to plan.

So the lull is welcome but the lull is also a lull in Jake's development; again this is not negative. I'm not saying Jake isn't developing but he's just being Jake right now. He's walking so we're not waiting for him to walk, he's eating everything he can so we're not waiting for that and he's sleeping through 9 nights out of 10 so we're not waiting for that either. It's just Clare, Jake and I and we're just living our family life.

There's some stuff at work which has stopped me making more blog posts and added some stress but other than that it's pretty much normal. We're looking forward to Christmas but only in the regular sense of needing a break and wondering how Jake will find his second festive season.

At some stage next year Jake will either start talking coherent words, or, of course he won't, but it's not until then that the cleft thing will be raised. I am what some would call pessimistic but what I would call a realist, so knowing that 50% of cleft affected kids require speech therapy I'd bet on Jake being in the needing-it group. But that's cool, he'll get the therapy and will be able to speak fine soon enough, there's no hurry.

So there you have it, a blog post about having nothing to blog about. Which is exactly what I wanted!

21st Century Mummy - a blog for mums (and dads) everywhere

A friend of mine has started writing a blog for mums everywhere. She's just quit her job to concentrate on a new career as a journalist (something I always wanted to be) and from what I've read so far, she won't struggle to find work.

She's writing about everything that affects mums everywhere both old hands and new. From pregnancy and birth to childcare, shopping and travel and of course, everything about being a mum in the 21st century

The link is below, please feel free to hop over and check it out.

http://21stcenturymummy.wordpress.com/

Never say 'I can't' again...

I saw the following video on a Facebook post and I defy you not to be impressed. The link I saw (which I can't find on You Tube) started with a series of statements before this video. They were as follows:

This is a true story...

A son asks his father, 'Dad would you run a marathon with me?'

Despite his age and a heart condition, his father says 'Yes'

And they run that marathon together.

Then the son asks him 'Will you run another marathon with me?'

Again his father says 'Yes' and they run a second marathon.

Then the son asks him 'Would you run the Iron man with me?'

For those of you who do not know, the Iron man is the world's toughest triathlon. A 4Km swin, followed by a 180Km cycle and finished off with a 42Km marathon.

Again, the father says 'Yes'.

This story may not have touched you yet. Now watch the video below.

"Jake" - coming to a theatre near you...

Recently I spent a small fortune on a new pc. I thought, early last year, when I spent a small fortune on a laptop that this wouldn't have been necessary, at least not as soon as this. The laptop was £800 which is a lot of dough for me and had all the features I needed: 2Gb Ram, dual cores for improved multitasking, dvd burner, fast graphics etc, etc. What I hadn't realised was that when I bought my HD video camera it wouldn't be man enough to edit the footage.

I always do a lot of research when it comes to tech purchases and the Canon HF-10 was no exception. My basement is fully HD'd up, 40 inch flat screen, PS3, blu-ray, the whole charabanc. I have an OCD-like predisposition which forbids me from buying anything which is either functional-but-bottom-of-the-range or that has the potential to become out of date within the year I purchase it. This, unfortunately means that I end up buying items which are more expensive and often, prone to faults. See my posts on buggies for instance.

Part of my research was to look into video formats and what was the most user friendly for the novice editor, i.e. me. I wanted something which I could connect to my pc, let me download the footage and make something nice. I hate home movies with a passion; they're all the same. Endless panning of views, zooming in and out, the same unaccomplished commentary, the standard hands covering the face of embarrassed women and so on. I think that home movies are only interesting when spliced, cut together, overlaid with titles and put to music. Cue new hobby or so I thought.

Being a keen amateur photographer and a brand loyalist, I chose the Canon. Canon has adopted the AVCHD ('Advanced Video Codec High Definition' if you care) format for tapeless HD recording. As a piece of hardware it really is impressive and the quality of the footage is excellent when viewed on its monitor or via an HD cable into the telly. The problems only start when you transfer it to your pc.

I appreciate that Canon is not a programming company but it has chosen to ship what is a very advanced hardware product with woefully inadequate software. Given that you could easily shoot professional quality video, the editing tools which accompany the purchase allow you to do little more than view and cut chunks of the footage out. There is no timeline, video transitions, effects or sound options etc. I have a 20 minute rule when it comes to software which means that if I can't get my head around something in that time, it's clearly not been designed properly. This is normally more about me and my lack of skill than the developer's interface design shortcomings, however in this case the software lasted about half that time until I uninstalled it.

I'm sure everyone's had that moment where they buy something they thought they really wanted, for more than they could afford (£650 in this case) only to discover that it doesn't live up to expectations or that they needed something else to make it work. It's like when you're really out of your depth, like buying an expensive sailing boat before you've learned to sail. Or something.

Luckily we have people at work who know about these things so I install a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro which is similar to the industry leader, Final Cut Pro which you may have heard of. Turns out that CS3 doesn't support AVCHD natively so had to 'source' a plug in for this which could have cost a further £150 on top of the £500 + for Premiere. Also turns out that 2Gb or Ram and just the 2 processors wouldn't even get me close for editing. I could view a 5 second clip but still had to reboot every time.

Eventually I sold the video camera at a £200 loss but do have a year's worth of Jake sitting on my pc. I bought a Panasonic Lumix TZ7 digital camera which also shoots HD, albeit 720 as opposed to 1080. Much more useful as Clare takes it everywhere and we'll get a lot more of Jake that way.

Anyway the point is that up until I bought my new pc, the new hobby I was so excited about just over a year ago has been well and truly on hold. At long long last I have the new pc, installed newer versions of the software, learned how to use it and am finally putting together nicely edited video of Jake's first year. The software is quite intimidating at first but I'm slowly getting to grips with how to create subclips from larger clips (the ones where I do a lot of panning and zooming and Clare covers her face a lot), add mp3 files, add still images etc and cut the whole thing together. It's quite addictive but also time consuming. I'm up to around 40 mins of the final video and it's taken me 6 or 7 hours so far but I'm enjoying it immensely.

It's incredible looking back at videos of Jake, especially before his lip was fixed. It's still not shocking to me but I notice it more now than I did then. He's changed massively in a year and although the video thing was a hassle I'm so pleased I bothered to get the footage I did.

The finished video will be too big for You Tube but I'll try to break it up and put some up here when I'm done.