March, 2008:

Five cool things about our wedding

• We got married in the tropical house of Central Park Zoo, New York. We were the first people ever to do so.
• We had to get our wedding license from City Hall. The notice-boards in the licensing office were covered in little notes that people had written declaring their love for one another. It was beautiful.
• I spent the hour prior to the wedding looking round the worlds biggest toy shop in Time Square, then caught the subway to the Zoo.
• When we got back to England we had a huge party for all our friends and relations. I managed to avoid having to do a first dance.
• Every single day since I have had reason to be thankful that Kerry agreed to be my wife.

One un-cool thing about our wedding

• We left our wedding cake in the hotel kitchen and told the staff they could have a slice. When we came down the next morning they had eaten the whole thing. The greedy bastards.

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It’s the day before my wedding anniversary, and so what better way to celebrate it than to write a blog post about women other than my wife that I am sexually attracted to.

First of all I need to get rid of Kerry. Hang on.

There, there’s no way she’s going to get her eyes past that.

So anyway, I was making my rounds this morning and I saw that Avitable had posted an excerpt from the movie Teen Wolf. I clicked play and was merrily lost in good clean nostalgia when suddenly, there she was. A vision of pure loveliness.

Boof.

Just in case you are not familiar with the seminal work that is Teen Wolf (1985) – Boof (played by Susan Ursitti) was the best friend of main character Scott Howard (Michael J Fox). As is often the way in such movies she was in love with Scott but he was too blind to see it. He choose instead to chase after some cheerleader or other, which was always completely baffling to me. I mean, she was Boof for goodness sake! Everything that a man could possibly wish for!

Scott was also, of course, a werewolf. But instead of running around eating people he chose to use his Lycanthropy to play basketball. If only Oz from Buffy the Vampire slayer had thought of that I’m sure life would have been a lot easier.

Obviously Scott eventually saw sense and got it together with Boof, and everything ended happily ever after. The whole thing was a pretty tried and tested formula for teen movies in the 80s. Teen Wolf wasn’t quite as pretty as Pretty in Pink or as wonderful as Some Kind of Wonderful. But it was a lot more wolfy, and that counts for a lot in my book.

And, of course, it also featured Boof.

If you had told my adolescent self that one day there would be a time that I had forgotten my borderline obsession with that her I would have just laughed in your face. But forgotten her I had. Which got me thinking about all the my other celebrity crushes that have now faded into the recesses of my memory:

1. Six from Blossom – Although I had a thing for Blossom too. But if I had to choose it would be Six all the way. I just couldn’t stand to have Joey Lawrence as a brother-in-law. Whoa.
2. Pheobe Cates from Fast Times at Ridgemont High – Mmmmmm, Pheobe Cates.
3. Boof from Teen Wolf – There is a joke here about hairy palms but I can’t bring myself to write it.
4. Helen Slater from Secret of my Sucess – Another Michael J Fox co-star. That bloody midget gets all the girls.
5. Jet from Gladiators – I liked it when she dueled with her pugil stick.
6. Helen Hunt from Only You – I know there is a lot of bad feeling towards Hunt, but the film Only You was my first exposure to her and she was adorable in it.

Honorable mentions go to Power Girl and Jessica Rabbit, who both would have made the list if it were not for their absence of a corporial body.

So who were the subjects of your own teen crushes?

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This evening Amy and I were making our way through our family videos on YouTube. She was enjoying seeing herself as a baby and looking at toys that have long since been relegated to the attic. But then I put on the first video I ever made of her, a montage of shots of various members of our immediate family holding her as a newborn set to an Indigo Girls track.

And as soon as it came on Amy burst into tears. She wasn’t able to articulate what was wrong, and she was insistent that I didn’t turn it off. But the tears were rolling down her face as we watched it. Later on she said it was because the song mentions ghosts, and that ghosts were scary. But I don’t buy it.

I don’t suppose either of us will ever really know why she was crying. But I can’t help feeling that it is for the same reason that I get a lump in my throat every time I see that video. And even though I’m 28 years older than her I don’t think I can articulate it either. Words aren’t enough sometimes.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any honest to goodness daddy blogging here. But a Daddy Blogger is still how I define myself. Not because it’s what I write about, but because it is what I am about. My family are my reason for being, nothing else comes close.

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It really is something when a fellow blogger is willing to fly half way round the world just to meet up with you.

Last night Kerry and I went out to dinner with Sam from Rabbits Confused with Raisins. Just think, a mere 48 hours ago he was sunning himself on the beaches of Sydney, Australia and now he was sitting down to Tai green curry with us in England. Such is the sheer force of my magnetic charisma. It is a great power, and with it comes great responsibility. With a mere flick of my wrist I could have half the population of the world flocking to worship at my feet. Yet I choose to call only a selected few.

Of course Sam’s decision to come over may possibly have been influenced by the fact that I’m his brother. And that maybe he also wanted to see his girlfriend and our parents too. But I still maintain that it was his sheer idolatry and veneration of me that primarily drew him home.

We had kept his arrival secret from our parents and so they were naturally overjoyed to see him. We sprung him on my mother last night and my dad this afternoon. Of course now he’s been back for a whole two days everyone is fed up to the back teeth with the little git. Still, he’s only here for a couple of weeks so we’ll be rid of him soon.

Amazingly during our meal last night I somehow managed to take a half decent photograph of him. An spectacular feat given the original source material. Unfortunatley in order to provide balance I am now required by the international federation of older brothers to publish the following:

Top 10 embarrassing facts about my brother.

10. When he was five, His favorite food was Pedigree Chum.
9. He has over 40 pairs of flip-flops. Yet has never worn any of them.
8. He has transcribed and memorized the entire first series of Deal or No Deal
7. He claims to have attended Hogwarts on his CV.
6. He is so vain that his mirror shades point inwards.
5. When stressed he has a tendency to smear himself with yogurt.
4. He has an inexplicable hatred of the Swiss.
3. Before it was changed to “Environmental Consultant” his official job title was “Street Cleaner”
2. His greatest claim to fame is that he can juggle with one ball.
1. He has been living in Australia for over five months, yet he still doesn’t know what a jumbuck is.

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In July of this year I shall be walking 78 miles in 6 days in aid of the Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity founded by my close friends in memorial to their son Joseph who died aged 3 in April of 2005. Please look here for further details and consider sponsoring me. Thank you.

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For the past three weeks there have been posters of this nine year old girl pinned up on every lamp post, wall, and shop window of my town. Every time Amy sees one she tells me very sadly

“That little girl is lost and her mummy and daddy can’t find her”

I told her that it would be ok, that she would be found eventually, and that everything would be alright.

But I didn’t believe it.

But today she has been found alive in a house only a mile from her home. We don’t know what has happened to her in the last three weeks, and we can only hope that it was not something that will leave irreparable scars. But when I heard the news my cynical news-weary heart lifted. I can now tell my daughter that the girl has found her mummy and daddy. And that’s worth a hell of a lot to me.

• BBC news report
• And slightly more depressingly, an interesting piece on the media’s treatment of the case.

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Evenings in our household usually see me at the computer table and Kerry watching the TV. Some might see it as a pretty antisocial way of spending our time together, but it works well for us and that’s the main thing. I have a big, and rather expensive pair of headphones that I use to drown out the television. It’s true I look like a bit of a pillock when I have them on, but without them my subconscious would suck up and spit out random quotes from whatever TV show Kerry’s watching into my posts. My prose is mangled enough without throwing painful pseudo scientific exposition from CSI: Milwaukee into the mix.

Kerry actually has pretty good taste in TV. Many a time I have sat down at the computer intending to compose an insightful post on my top ten favorite socks but have become distracted by whatever she is watching instead. This wouldn’t be a problem except I frequently work evenings and so am never able to keep up to date. This means when my interest is captured I never know what’s going on. A prime offender for this is the show Men in Trees (a sort of Northern Exposure but a bit more girly and with 80% less quirk). “Who’s she?” I ask, “Who’s he?”, “Why aren’t they together any more?”, “What is the collective noun for moose?”. I am also compelled to make the same old joke over and over again (“Where’s this show set?”. “Alaska”. “No, it’s OK, I’ll ask her myself”). Even more irritatingly I then follow it up with the other classic place name gag (“My wife’s gone to the Caribbean”. “Jamaica?”. “No, she went on her own accord”).

How I am not divorced I will never know.

Tonight however Kerry’s choice of TV has got me distracted for another reason. She is watching Project Catwalk (the UK version of the US show Project Runway). I’m pretty sure she generally tries to watch the show when I’m not around, as my frequent grunts of anger and disbelief at it must be very off-putting. My main issue with the program is the presenter. The American version is hosted by Heidi Klum, a German supermodel with years of experience in the fashion industry. The British one however has Kelly bloody Osborne, the internationally famous talentless waste of skin and blubber.

I do feel sorry for the woman. She’s no doubt had a pretty horrendous childhood by most people’s standards. And with the exposure she’s had it’s not like she could ever go and get a job at Macdonalds. But she really needs to find something to do other than presenting, she’s just dreadful.

In this evening’s show she was giving all the contestant’s a pep talk and started outlining how she thought they could raise their game. The contestants were all smiles and sincere nods, but you could see the repressed rage behind their eyes. Each and every one of them was battling with an overwhelming urge to leap out of their chair and punch her in the throat. And let me tell you, there wouldn’t be a jury in the land that would convict them. Who the hell is she to tell these obviously talented and driven people how to practice their art? The only genuine piece of advice she could ever give would be “Try to have someone famous for your dad”.

Ooo she makes me mad.

Still, at least I got a blog post out of it. That’s never a bad thing.

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