Today marks 12 years since my father died. I’ve written about it previously so won’t rehash it all here.

I miss my father and I am sad that he isn’t here to be a Poppy for my children.

But this is the hand I was dealt, and I’m making it work as best I can; having a wonderful wife and two healthy boys is a pretty sweet life

I am a father again! My wife and I, the delightful Mrs Guru, welcomed our second child into the world on Monday 15 March, 2010. We had a second son, and we named him Gus.

This isn’t a recount of the birth adventure (which was timely, standard and quite pleasant this time around, all things considered); I will save that for my other website, which I am still working at updating, though I will cross-post that one when I do write it up.

No, rather than the birth, I wanted to reflect on the unbelievably selfless and challenging role that parenting is.

I’ll be honest, I had no idea just how damn tough being a parent can be. I love my kids and I love being a parent, that’s not the issue – I just had no idea at what was demanded, which is basically handing over your every moment (waking and otherwise) to little people who won’t ever really appreciate it themselves until they continue the circle and have children of their own.

Baby Gus is feeding quite a lot, as he was a little tiny thing and needs to fatten up a bit. My wife has spent a lot of the past week just sitting on the couch or lying in bed, feeding and feeding our wee lad. She has a sore back and is very tired, but she keeps going because she is, like most mothers, simply amazing.

A second child is an even bigger challenge than a first, as not only are you welcoming and settling in a new one, but also taking care of your first child as well. This very moment, for instance, I am sitting up with my eldest boy Leo, who is sick and miserable and wants only to watch In the Night Garden and snuggle on the couch. Nothing else is helping him so this is where we are, at 2.30am on a school night.

Parenting is hard and I had no idea beforehand at just how demanding it would be. Not for a second though do I regret having my children – they are the best thing I have ever done, and a happy family is my sole ambition. I am exhausted and so is my wife, yet the tender moments of cuddles and smiles are as good as sleep most of the time, so we adapt and we soldier on and we raise our babies.

Over the past 48 hours, I conducted a little ’speriment. I used Twitter to make a decision for me, and I have sworn to abide by its verdict.

You see, I’ve never really been all that big a fan of soccer, or The World Game (SUE ME SBS!) and so have never had a team to follow. In other sports I have teams (Carlton in AFL, Storm in NRL, Brumbies in S14, Vic in everything else) and I like following someone.

Enough. It was time to find a team and jump on board!

A few people I follow on Twitter are huge soccer fans and seem really quite passionate about their team and results and 0-0 draws after 90 minutes (NOTHING HAPPENED! DON’T YOU WANT A REFUND?!) and so on.

Joining the dots, I devised an evil scheme:

I would put it to a vote and let Twitter choose my team. And I would fall in behind the result.

For a 24 hour period, I invited people to vote for their teams and I’d support the one with the most votes. It started slowly at first, but more votes piled in, until the end of the 24 hour period…

I HAD A 6-WAY TIE!

6 teams had been voted for, by six people. Get the maths of it (and low voter turnout)? Six people said their team, and they were all different!

Rather than call for a run-off and further embarrassing vote numbers, I put the names of each team onto a scrap of paper, then into a semi-clean lunch container where they were shaken and shaken. I then asked a work colleague to choose a sticky note at random.

The verdict… I am now an Arsenal fan.

The gunners, yeah! I don’t know much about them, so I did some digging and came across a recent blog entry from Nick Hornby. I like his passion for his team, and so I feel ok about supporting them now.

My thanks to the tweeps who voted in my poll:
@cherriemoore
@Heath_Eddy
@PostProdEditor
@MrTHill
@clubwah
@euaneggs

Let’s go Gunners!

Tags: arsenal, soccer, the world game, twitter decides

I am HOPELESS at just sitting down at the computer and getting stuff done.

I have been trying to get some work done for a couple of hours now, and each time I start to write a few lines, I do the old ALT-TAB and flick across to see what’s making the news, and whether I have any new emails (even though I get a desktop alert if I get an email).

This blog post is an attempt to force myself into writing something – even though it’s not the work that I need to be doing. I figure if I sit down and type some stuff, perhaps I’ll get into the groove and then be able to get done the things that I need to.

I guess I should talk about something then… what I got up to today? Kinda predictable, but what the heck. It’s a start.

Today is Australia Day. My count-them-on-one-hand readers are all Australian, so they know this already and have no doubt enjoyed themselves today. I woke up about 9.30, with the little lad having had a sleep-in, owing to a late night out at a friend’s BBQ. He woke up just after I did, which was handy. I hate it when he wakes before I do, and robs me of sleep! My wife was going in to work this morning, so the lad and I had our cereal and a shower, before heading to the shops to pick up some groceries and a present for a neighbour across the road. The neighbour in question was having a 1st birthday BBQ today, so we got a present and a card and came home to quickly wrap it up and write on the card. The shop we went to was having a sale, so I picked up a couple of cool dude t-shirts for the lad as well. As you do.

My wife got home at lunchtime and we headed across the road. The BBQ was a post-actual-birthday affair, and this one was for the mothers’ group people, but we scored an invitation owing to our recent establishment of a relationship with these neighbours, who are lovely. We walked in and got the introduction to all these couples and their children, and rode out the first bit of newbie awkwardness without too much trouble.

After a bit, lunch was ready and we sat down to a far of BBQ meat and yummy salads (though the ravioli and apple, covered in potato salad dressing, was a bit weird). The table we were at was pretty chatty and everyone was nice, talking about kids, houses, burglaries and the like. Normal suburban conversations for parents! As the mothers drifted off to the lounge room to watch over the kidlets, us dads were sitting down and enjoying a cold beer. Conversation soon turned to football, as it does at these things when a bunch of men are meeting for the first time. Was a good footy chat though, without anyone being too ‘Mike Sheehan’ and acting like a tool. I had to duck off about 3, as I was meeting a mate to hit the driving range! I bade farewell and headed out.

I’d been wanting to have a hit at the driving range for a couple of months, since I played a short 9 holes with a few work guys a couple of months back. I had never been much of a golfer at all, playing a handful of rounds and being quite sucky. But this past time I had a ball, and really enjoyed the walk and the outdoorsiness of it all. I have a terrible swing though and a strike rate of 50%, so the driving range was a good place to try and arrest that.

My mate and I got a bucket each of 80 balls, and headed out for a hit. I was ok, and connected about 75% of the time – an improvement! By the time I was down to my last 10 balls, I was making acceptable contact and actually getting some air. Up until then, there had been a few worm-burners and skimmers. I can feel now that I’ll be sore down the left-hand side of my ribs and stomach tomorrow, but that’s fine.

I should also mention that I bought myself some clubs the other day! I was only after a cheap and reasonable-nick set, and after combing Cash Converters with no success, checked out eBay. There were some great sets going for cheapish prices, but I still couldn’t justify $300 on clubs, even if they normally retail for $800. SO I found another website which was selling sets of clubs that were actually marketed to beginners and occasional golfers. It comes with a bag, most of the clubs I’ll need, and the bag even has pop-out legs for easy standing. All for $99 plus delivery! So after getting the seal of approval from the wife, I purchased a set of these bad boys. They should arrive in a week or so, and I can’t wait to get them out and have a swing.

After that, I came home and played with the lad for a while. He’s a bit of a fan of wrestling with me at the moment, so we mucked about for a bit before I cooked tea.

Dinner was an Aussie standard – steak and veg. The rump was a bit tough, though my steamed vegies were delicious. I find it hard not to overcook vegies for some reason, but these were just right. A fair dash of salt, and all was good.

After that I tidied up a bit and put the lad to bed. The wife is making cupcakes tonight, some of which I am taking to work for my team. They’re a good morning tea snack and a nice gesture.

And here I am now, after a couple of hours in which I’ve done about 15 minutes of proper work. These 1,000 or so words have flowed pretty well though, it’s good. Means I should be able to try and keep up something resembling a schedule of writing now. For a long time I’ve struggled to just type at home. Work is ok; perhaps the salary makes it easier to let words flow from my fingers? Home writing has been a bit of a challenge in the last couple of years. Part lazy, part hard. I like what I’ve done tonight though, which is just write about anything, no matter how boring an uninteresting, and just get the fingers moving about on the black keys.

Should do more of that!

Later skaters.

September 1st? As in four and a half months ago? Wow, it has been forever since I actually posted something here. I cannot believe it has been that amount of time. Since I set this lil thang up back in late 2005, I’ve missed the odd month here and there, but never 4 months between content. I mean sure, I posted one of those Downfall clips we all love, but that’s just a YouTube link, innit? No excuses. I need to pull my finger out and make this blog worthwhile to my 4 readers, or else I’m just another git taking up room on the interwebs and offering fuck all in return for it.

In my defence (I’ve done well to wait until par 2 before justifying my laziness, eh) I have been superbly busy and otherwise occupied. At this minute, my wife and I are just 7 weeks away from welcoming our second child into the world! Super-excited and really starting to wish time away so he (we’re told it’s another boy) can join our little family.

My side project – being a daddy – is months behind in content updates as well (about 9 for that one). I need to type up all these notes I have on pads and scraps of paper, and get the record up to date and start in on that weekly parenting pseudo-column I originally had in mind. There was a flurry of activity over at that site in September last year, where I churned out about 20 posts in a couple of weeks, but then it was back to stagnation and the traffic dropped off, as it does.

I have been very active on Twitter, as you can see from the sidebar where my tweets appear. I think Twitter suits my inability to focus on things for more than 15 minutes at a time – a half-way readable decent blog entry takes me about 30 mins to draft, proof and publish, and sometimes I just don’t have that kind of time. Twitter makes it all so short and sweet, which is handy. But it isn’t really a decent record of your rants and raves, is it, as context is generally pretty critical if your thoughts are to be more than a ‘look at me’ moment.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that enough was enough in the physical health stakes, and made an appointment with my long-neglected local gym. I was weighed and measured, and found to be wanting. No surprises there. But I had a plan drawn up, which has me doing 3 sessions a week of 60 minutes each, alternating between cardio and weights training. In addition to this, I took a leaf out of a few tweeples books and jumped on board the Couch to 5k bandwagon and downloaded the app for my iPhone. I forced myself through days 1 and 2, and then had to get my longstanding ingrown toenail cut out, as it was ripping my toe to bits whenever I ran. That happened on Thursday, so mid-week this week I should be able to whack the runners back on and start pounding the pavement and treadmill once more.

Back in September I was approached about a job offer, and so being a polite man, gave the enquirer the courtesy of 5 minutes of my time. I couldn’t believe it, but the role they were looking to fill was everything I wanted my next role to be, and it was time to move on from my last employer, so the timing was perfect. I’d hit a wall work-wise and nothing was going to change – I’d learned all I could there and was jack of the place. So all went well over a few chats and coffees, and the job was mine. I snatched it up, enjoyed a couple of weeks respite between (where I planned to get my online life up to date, but was distracted by the backyard and Bunnings) and started in early November. It has been absolutely fantastic since, and I’m loving work for the first time in a few years. Nice to be able to say that.

As for my creative self, I have neglected that too. I have a Moleskine in my satchel which hasn’t had its cover opened since about October last year. It always happens to me – every time I try and start some sort of regular journal, I give up after a few months. I don’t know why as I love the idea of a journal, but I seem to baulk at recording real journal-y stuff in case someone finds it and takes it the wrong way. To counter this, I set up another side-project online, which nobody knows about, and am ready to start using that as my non-identifiable channel to really open up and examine myself in the cold light of day. I’ve created a persona for that project, twitter account and all, and will see how it goes. I do plan to be still doing it in six months though… we’ll see.

For now, I think I’ll sign off. I do promise to make more of an effort to share something of dubious value on a more frequent basis, and hopefully someone will find it interesting.

Humerous response to the AFL All-Australian team, which never leaves everyone happy.

A little while ago I was reading an old feature article about the now-axed Tony Martin radio show Get This. In it, Ed Kavalee said of Martin’s influence on him:

“He’s made me learn that there’s no substitute for working your arse off.”

With this as my inspiration, I have pulled my finger out and will now use much more of my ’spare time’ to write, write, write and do less faffing around.

To assist, I have recently procured a lovely little 13″ Macbook Pro, and my iPhone is capable of tethering, so there is no excuse for not being a much more active writer and keeping my various online projects going.

To that end, I have made a conscious decision to update, re-skin and re-launch one of my side projects, beingadaddy.net. This week, I am spending my lunch hours and nights catching up on around 11 months worth of entries (I have been keeping notes offline, but never got around to writing them up) and trying to build some non-blog-post content as well. Any suggestions welcome.

I plan to relaunch the site in a couple of weeks, and then really work my arse off at building it into something people will actually want to read. I’ve come across a lot of possible publishing avenues of late in the parenthood genre, where I’m sure if I was to pitch a piece here and there and have a decent blog of work behind me, I may have half a shot. May as well chance my arm!

In a similar vein, I’ve recently built the company website for my brother-in-law’s security business and really enjoyed that. So I have enrolled in a short course at the Melbourne CAE for 4 Monday nights, starting next month, and will sharpen up my skills in this area. I’d love to have my own little marketing outfit and just wile away on small jobs for local businesses, building websites and doing some other freelance and business writing. Can’t make it happen if I don’t try though.

With a concerted effort to build up my skills and creative output, I do hope to be in a position where I can consider giving it a decent nudge.

A doozy of a sub-edit FAIL from The Age.

What a hoot!

Cricket Speech Presented at Lord’s 14th July 2009

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It is an honour to stand before so many cricketing heroes from England and from Australia and at this, my favourite time of year. The time when that magical summer sound comes to our ears and gladdens our old hearts, the welcome sound of leather on Graham Swann.

I have been asked to say a few words – well more than a few. “You’ve twenty minutes to fill,” I was firmly told by the organisers. 20 minutes. Not sure how I’ll use all that time up. Perhaps in about ten minutes or so Andrew Strauss would be kind enough to send on a a physio, that should kill a bit of time.

Now, many of you will be wondering by what right I presume to stand and speak in front of this assembly of all that is high and fine and grand and noble and talented in the world of cricket, and to speak too in this very temple of all that is historic, majestic and ever so slightly preposterous and silly in that world? I certainly can’t lay claim to any great cricketing achievements. I can’t bat, I can’t field, I bowl off the wrong foot. That sounds like a euphemism for something else, doesn’t it? “They say he bowls off the wrong foot, know what I mean? He enters stage left. Let me put it this way, he poles from the Cambridge end of the punt.” Actually as a matter of fact, although it is true in every sense that I have always bowled off the wrong foot. I have decided, since Sunday, to go into the heterosexual breeding business. My first three sons will be called Collingwood Fry, Anderson Fry and Monty Fry. That’s if their mother can ever get them out, of course. But back to the original question you so intelligently, if rhetorically, asked. If I can’t play, what can I do? I can umpire, I suppose, after a fashion. A fashion that went out years ago around the time of those two peerless umpires, perhaps some of you are old enough to remember them, Jack Crapp and Arthur Fagg. I remember them. I remember them every morning, as a matter of fact: Crapp and Fagg. Though now, sadly, the law says we can no longer do it in public places. And I believe that may even apply to smoking too. Anyway. We were on the subject of why I’m speaking to you. I don’t play. I’m not even a cricketing commentator, journalist or writer. I suppose the only right I have to be amongst you, the cricketing élite, might derive from my being said to represent, here in the Long Room, all those who have spent their lives loving the game at a safe distance from the square. It is love for the game that brings me here.

In the forty-five years that I have followed cricket, I have seen it threatened from all sides by the horrors of modern life. The game has been an old-fashioned blushing maiden laid siege by coarse and vulgar suitors. A courtship pattern of defence, acceptance, capitulation and finally absorption has followed. When I started watching, A. R. Lewis played for and captained England as an amateur. The game could never recover surely, from being forced, against the will of many of those who ran this place, being forced to become solely a professional sport? I am just old enough to remember too the Basil D’Oliveira affair in all its unsavoury nastiness: the filth of racism and international politics was beginning to stain the pure white of the flannels. The one-day-game appeared, shyly at first. The balance of bat and ball, essential for cricket to make any sense as a sporting spectacle, became threatened, everyone agreed, by the covering of wickets which would privilege batsman, and then that necessary equipoise was threatened the other way by the arrival of extreme pace and the pitiless bouncer. The look and style of cricketers was apparently forever compromised by helmets and elastic waisted trouserings hideous to behold. Cane and canvas pads were replaced by wipe clean nylon fastened by Velcro. Kerry Packer arrived and sowed his own blend of discord. The continuing rise and mutation of one day cricket caused panic from Windermere to Woking as white balls and coloured pyjamas threatened the sanity of Telegraph readers everywhere. Rogue South African tours caused alarm and frenzy. Pitch invasions marked an end of the days when schoolboys could lie on their tummies by the boundary-rope filling in a green scoring book, until they got bored which they inevitably did, all except the speccy swatty ones who were laughed at and are now running the world. The rest of us were too busy asking the man in the Public Announcement tent to put out a message for our lost friends Ivor Harden, Hugh Janus, Seymour Cox and Mike Hunt. One turbulent decade began with John Snow getting barracked and bombarded with tinnies and ended with batsmen getting bounced and sledged. Cameras and microphones got closer and closer to the action to overhear the insults and demystify the bowling actions. The art of spin had disappeared, for ever, some believed. Cricketers wives wrote books about the overseas tours. Reverse swing seemed to arrive out of nowhere : “Not only does he bowl off the wrong foot. They say he swings it the other way.” Ball tampering became a matter of dinner party chat from Keswick to Canterbury . Clever 3-D images were painted on the grass round about the long stop area advertising power generation companies no one had ever heard of. Advertising was not only to be seen on the grass, but on the clothes, Vodafone and Castlemaine were stitched bigger and brighter on the shirts than the three lions and the wallabies and that mysterious silver feather that Kiwis seem so unaccountably fond of.

The county game was rent asunder into leagues and divisions that no one really understands; the politics and governance of cricket, with its contracts and coaches, its bloated fixture lists and auctions of broadcasting rights caused hand-wringing too, though many would rather it were neck-wringing.

Meanwhile, drugs, drinking binges, embarrassing text messages and other scandals continued to erupt like acne on a teenager.

South Africa returned to the fold as other countries entered the club of test playing nations. Kenya, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

Two of those speccy boys who used to score at the sidelines got their revenge, their names were Mr Lewis and Mr Duckworth.

To the dictionary of acronyms and initials were added ODI, T-20 and IPL. Power plays and baseball style pinch-hitters were swept in. The old lady of cricket was getting a right duffing up.

Yet, amazingly, none of these changes, professionalism, the covered wickets, helmets, day-night games, confirmed the dire prognostications of those who believed each one might hammer a stump into cricket’s fragile heart. For this same period of my cricket watching life saw some of the greatest matches in the game’s history. The 1981 and 2005 Ashes series, the Tied Test; a new aggression and boldness of stroke play that no one could disapprove of. Scoring rates went up and great batsmen emerged: Lara, Tendulkar and Ponting amongst many others. And miraculously, to keep the game balanced, Warne and Murali showed that far from being dead, spin bowling was supremely alive; even providing a new ball in the form of the doozra. Huge crowds and rising popularity in fresh territories confirmed cricket’s health. Levels of fitness and standards of fielding rocketed. And all the while, the game’s greatest expression, the 5 Day Test Match, led the way, providing the greatest entertainment, the most excitement and the deepest commitment from the players. All those mournful predictions had come to nothing. The greatest of games had triumphed again.

But now, now, in the age of the internet, just as the great, great players of the past ten years have one by one started to play their farewell matches and leave the field for ever, hideous new forces have been at work. The newly emerged South Africa became mired in scandal, intrigue and misery as the new disease of spread-betting lived up to its name and spread, spread like cholera through a slum. Grotesque emails from professional umpires hit the headlines; allegations of systematic cheating and match-fixing have become commonplace, a dismal and lamentably organised Shop Window for international cricket, its 2007 World Cup seemed to lay the game low: an incomprehensible and dreadful tragedy in the death of Bob Woolmer its ghastly and unforgettable legacy. As if that weren’t enough we were more recently treated to the embarrassing spectacle of cricket’s governors cosying up to a Texan fraudster with a helicopter and a bigger mouth than wallet.

A new kind of bitterness has entered some quarters of the game as ex-players become commentators, columnists and journalists and begin to turn on their erstwhile teammates, dispraising the current players, pouring scorn on their technique and deprecating their tactical nous. We have video of course and can see that these pundits know what they were talking about: historical archive reveals that Boycott, Botham, Gower, Atherton, Willis, and Hussein were never out playing a false shot, never shuffled across, never missed a captaincy trick, never dropped a catch, never posted a fielder in the wrong place and never bowled off line or off length in the entire course of their careers.

The benefits and the drawbacks of broadcast technology bewilder us. Hotspots and Hawkeye, referrals and replays, umpires have never been more pressured and exposed and greater more seismically structural questions have never been asked about the meaning and spirit of the game. The rewards are greater, the stakes are higher, the price of failure more public and humiliating.

So a hundred years on from cricket’s Golden Age of C. B. Fry here is another Fry, searching for a way to toast a game that appears to have become … well, toast.

We could choose to believe that and retreat into memories of an apparently innocent and gilded past. We could wash our hands of it all, or we could choose to continue to believe in the game. Not necessarily in its administrators, nor even its players, though most of them in all divisions of the game are proud and gifted. We could choose to have faith in cricket. I for one do truly believe that the game itself, as first played by shepherds in the south of England, the game that spread to every corner of the world, the supreme bat and ball competition, the greatest game ever devised, will continue to provide unimagined pleasures, that true drama will once more come centre stage, booting into the wings the tragedy and farce we have witnessed over the past decade in particular. There will be new scandals of course: that you can depend upon. Undreamt of debacles, imbroglios, furores, brouhahas, crimes, rows, walk-outs and embarrassments are waiting around the corner, quietly slipping the horseshoe into the boxing-glove and preparing to give the goddess Cricketina a sock in the jaw. But new geniuses, new historic last ball climaxes, new unimaginable heights of athletic, tactical and aesthetic pleasure await us too. It is up to the players to believe in the game and the cricketing administrators to believe in the players. But most of all it is up to us to keep the faith and be unashamed, be proud of our love of cricket. Here, in the very place that is so often called cricket’s Mecca, cathedral and temple, is the place for us all to pledge that faith. I do so happily as I raise a glass in toast, on behalf of cricket lovers everywhere to Andrew Strauss in his Benefit Year and his wonderful Team, to Ricky Ponting and his fine tourists and to cricket itself. For, to misappropriate Benjamin Franklin, Cricket is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. So then: raise your glasses, to Strauss, England, Australia and cricket.

© Stephen Fry 2009

Fry’s website

Testing out the new landscape keyboard on iPhone OS3. Not bad, my thumbs are having to move a lot more than they’re used to though!

Not sure how often I’ll use the voice memo thing, I don’t use notes effectively as it is.

MMS is a welcome addition, should never have been left out of the original software.

Typing on landscape is going well, very easy to adjust to and far less incidental typos.

Will give myself few days to properly evaluate OS3 but great so far.

Tags: apple, iphone, os3