Stuff I like. Because I only update this website once every few years, this is more about perennial favourites than my latest loves.
Stuff I like. Because I only update this website once every few years, this is more about perennial favourites than my latest loves.
Food: I like more or less everything. My philosophy is that I'll try almost anything once (with food as with other things!). That said, I've been a pisco-vegetarian since 1998, for both health and ethical reasons. I'm not much of a cook (Steve does almost all the cooking in our house), but I do very much enjoy good food. Special favourites are pizza with tuna, anchovies, capers and olives; tortellini al pesto; sweet and sour cashew nuts, singapore noodles; balti prawn bhuna; Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby ice cream, which doesn't seem to exist in the UK any more - the best now is Dublin Mudslide.
Hats:
Yorkshire flat cap for general dog walking, colourful ski hat to pull down over my
ears when it's really cold, bandanna when driving my car with the roof down
Favourite clothes: silk shirts, jazzy waistcoats, leather jeans
Poetry: I like all sorts of modern poetry, including (according to mood): Keith Douglas, Sylvia Plath, T.S.Eliot, John Keats, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Miroslav Holub. My long-time favourite poet is Geoffrey Hill but I liked his early work best (those words which strike at the heart of any aging writer).
Humour: Offbeat; I tend to like satire (from Tom Lehrer onwards) and surreal humour (from Monty Python onwards). Especially if it involves wombats.
Cartoons: By and large I don't go in for cartoons, but I quite like Piled Higher and Deeper, Elf Only Inn and the wonderfully surreal Steven Appleby.
Sleeping: One of the best things in life is my waterbed. I love being nice and warm in bed and my waterbed has given me so many thousands of hours of cosy, deep sleep that I consider it one of the best things I've ever bought.
Friends: I have some good friends. I used to keep a “hotlist” of links to their “homepages” in this section but that's kind of gone out of fashion. Suffice it to say that my friends fall into a number of groups. I'm only still in touch with one person I knew when I was at school - if you found this page because you knew me at school, do contact me and let's talk! Then there's a bunch of friends from university with whom I founded SERF, the Software Engineers' Revolutionary Front. There are a bunch of people I know from being a bisexual activist and long-time poster to the Usenet group soc.bi which includes most of the past lovers that I'm still friends with. There's local friends, and finally, there's people I know through LiveJournal which includes members of all the other groups and then some.
These are some of the things which give me pleasure in life. There are many others, and I hope to find even more as life goes on!
Since 1998 I've owned a labrador retriever: Xena, Warrior Pet. Xena is arabic for “beautiful” but I named her after Xena, Warrior Princess because at 8 weeks old she was cute, charming but also very dangerous - those teeth were like needles (and can now crush bones).
I previously owned a yellow labrador, Kay, who lived to 15 years old. My LiveJournal avatar is a black-and-white picture of her.
My car is a Mercedes CLK320 cabriolet called Serena.
One of my main luxuries in life, I love driving my car. I worry a little about the ecological impact. This one may well also be the last petrol car I buy.
Almost everything in this car is tremendously well designed (the thing I liked about the Renaults I've had in the past too). And it's well built - nothing rattles. Visibility is great because there are no B-pillars to get in the way. It handles like a dream - much better than the alternatives I test-drove, particularly the Audi A4. In the future maybe all cars will be this good.
Being a romantic, I tend to go for big, emotional, symphonic stuff. My favourite classical composer is Sibelius (favourite symphony: 3rd); my favourite contemporary composer is Vangelis . Love those analogue synthesizer sounds. I like “progressive rock” too, especially 70s Yes. And all sorts of other kinds of things, notably John Adams, Synergy, various French chanteurs especially Francis Cabrel, Mahler, Earthworks, Satie, Penguin Cafe, Air and odd bits of rock and pop that I've picked up as I go through life.
I appreciate all sorts of art, but I favour expressionistic, emotive painting. I tend towards modern art (counting late Turner and the pre-raphaelites) mainly because it seems to me to encompass a wider range of approaches to both aesthetics and emotional state. Or something.
I especially like the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and David Hockney. I'm interested, as all three of them are, in the relationship between colour and emotion.
Among my current and long-past favourites are:
I could also mention Yes Minister, Monkey, The Water Margin and others. My favourite TV actresses are Amber Benson and Barbara Flynn.
Again, among many I have enjoyed these stand out:
I tend to like French films better than American ones. The French don't seem to be so hung up on resolving plots and imposing hetero-relationships. I guess Luc Besson is my favourite director. Favourite film actors: Alan Rickman, Cary Elwes.
My favourite UK city is Newcastle upon Tyne, where I used to live. I only moved away because I couldn't get a job there when I needed one. Maybe I'll get back there or thereabouts some day.
My favourite other city is Paris, France with New York City close behind. I've been to Paris dozens of times and New York only a handful. I have also been to many other European cities (though not Ireland yet) - Firenze in Italy stands out the most of these, but I've never been outside of Europe/North America, so hopefully I have many more wonderful places to discover! (Any offers?)
Computer games I've enjoyed:
No shoot-em-ups, you'll notice. I only like creative, non-real-time games.
In my view, the best operating system ever was Multics (see the the Multics FAQ) and nothing since then has been worth getting excited about. Of course, in my professional life I was a UNIX guru for a while and I still do some Solaris and Linux admin. I started using the Debian Linux distribution in February 1995 and have used it ever since, though nowadays I use Ubuntu which is based on Debian.
Yes, this page has a very psychedelic background if you have a graphical browser. Yes, it contains all sorts of revealing personal things about me. And the fact that I'm prepeared to reveal things also reveals something itself. Can you make sense of any of this? I'm not sure I can. Here's what some other people have said:
If you would like to contribute a review of this page, please e-mail me!
