Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everyhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B.Yeats

For Tom here's my EMail Address
And Here's the Duck Bus photos.
And, furthermore, here's the Chesterfield High school reunion stuff.

You have arrived, tired and dishevelled after a gruelling journey through the icy wastes of the antinternet, whipping your hugital diskies to a frenzy in a last, desperate attempt to reach a safe haven, at the webpage of Robin Pinguey.
Here you will find the detritus of an overactive cortex; steeped in pixeljuice and cranked up to the event horizon. Down below is the whiny, hectoring motor of my 12 Litre V18 weblog; elsewhere the skidmarks of a life driven at maximum speed sit snuggly upon the tarmac of the ordinary. What's that button for? How fast will it go? Will it roll over if I do this? Go on go on go on go on see if you can find out.

There are two sorts of people in the world: those who say "There are two sorts of people in the world." and those who don't.

So now that the curious amongst you know what a Pinguey is, perhaps you'd be interested to know more about the origin of the name; hell, perhaps you're also called Pinguey and shake your fist at the sky in rememberence of childhood teasing (Thank God Pingu the penguin wasn't about when I was a kid).
Anyway, I've been doing some research into our family history, check out the Pinguey Genealogy page to see the results.

Some hours later and, somewhat perversely, fifteen years earlier (see photo), I've been having a little drink. I like real ale, grunty red wines and single malt whisky, Belgian lager, Armagnac brandy and Champagne. I'm rather partial to Fino Sherry and I love a drop of port. Tequila always goes down well, either with salt and lemon or as a Margarita; dark rum's rather good, though the light has its moments. Gin and tonic is wonderfully refreshing in the summer and a stiff vodka martini will fix most things (at least in the short term).
Yes, seeing as you ask, I do like the occasional glass.

As Marshall McLuhan famously pointed out; the medium is the message, but this site is dedicated, in a hard-of-hearing sort of a way, to providing a mediocre massage. Floating in a sea of ambiguity, I have been a Gemini since birth and have a slew of interests that wax and wane in a way that ensures that I remain a Jack of all Trades and a Master of None I am, however, keen to show off my knowledge of assorted obscure subjects, and will be adding content accordingly as soon as I can overcome the very English handicap of trying not to be too clever.

Seems to have been nearly a year since I posted anything here; in fact I see a pattern forming: every 12 months I post an entry saying 'Where did the time go?' and then go bak to whatever it was I was doing. Anyway, I turned 49 this year so the next entry will presumably be when I'm 50 - are you still allowed to use a computer when you're that ancient?

The sound of a pool cue hitting a concrete floor...
What do you get if you hit a male resident of the Twenty-First Century so hard on the back of his head that his brains fly out of the front?
The butt of the cue hits the floor with a clunk, the peal of a bell compressed; stretch that sound and you'll find a universe inside; pick a galaxy, any galaxy. Jesus! Look at all those planetary systems, like flies round shit. That one, OK; nine planets; third from the sun; blue. Top left, just past the fjords, raggedy little island, top left again, down a bit; old house, back bedroom with the light burning into the night to frighten the cats and the cherry blossom and the wind sighing and just as your eyes begin to focus we move on.
What was I going to say?
Pull back from that universe until it's just a speck of light, a glint in a man's eye; study his face: turned to the fallen cue. Following the solid concussion of the handle striking the floor comes the rebound: the tinkling of the chalked tip tickling the surface, reverberating through the relative silence. To the right of the dropped stick a shiny drop of grey matter unthinks non-thoughts on a beer-stained stage.

For anyone who hasn't seen quite enough of them, here are the Embarrassing Reunion Photos.

The Reunion stuff was, on reflection, far too mawkish and has been consigned to the little picture of Dusty Bin (Laden?). Let's just say that there was a reunion of old school friends from Chesterfield High School some 30 (count them) years after we went our separate ways - we all enjoyed ourselves and will be doing it again soon.

A fragment of writing I did years ago whilst in a delicate emotional state, rediscovered whilst looking for something else:

Concensus.
She lives by her perception of me; by the flickering images that she projects upon the thin gauze echo of my being.
We are strangers who, many years ago and many miles apart, read the same book and now bicker endlessly over our cherished and distorted memories of character and plot.
I long to reach out and touch her but my fingers meet only my own parodic reflection in the hall of mirrors that is her mind.
What we could be together is something else: a bird that flies free in skies our faded eyes will never look upon.

I never did find whatever it was I was looking for.

Went to see the Youngblood Brass Band at Zanzibar in Liverpool - a quirky mix of New Orleans jazz and hiphop, one of those odd combinations that you really wouldn't expect to work but somehow does. Played in the snow (yeah, we had a white Christmas in March), continued my radical, organic treatment for SAD, involving copious amounts of real ale. Bummed around, half read a bunch of books for Uni (all of which I would have happily read of my own accord, but that little rebellious streak keeps distracting me because someone else told me to read them). Two that I actually enjoyed despite the feelings of oppression were Foe by J.M.Coetzee, a postmodern reworking of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, and The Hours by Michael Cunningham, a similarly intertextual slant on Virginia Woolf and her ground-breaking stream of consciousness novel Mrs Dalloway

Happy New Year! I've just been reading the Sunday newspaper and, surprise surprise, it's full of dreary crap about how everybody feels overweight and hung over this morning. It occurs to me that, if we all enjoyed a decent meal and a hearty drink throughout the year, we wouldn't suffer so much at the "Festive Season".
And I'm not making any bloody resolutions either.

Bartender: What can I get you sir?
Customer: Drunk.

Pip Pip!

This is a dangerous time for all of us, much has been made of the effect the new laws concerning the 'glorification of terrorism' will have on Guy Fawke's night celebrations. On balance though, we're actually celebrating him being caught and tortured to death, so that's all right then.
My University career moves on apace: books are read, assignments are written, marked and returned. Thus, as Keats may well have remarked, does the eternal cycle of blossom and decay continue down the centuries. I've signed up for a subsidiary module in archaeology and can now, as you can see, spell it. Combined with my English studies this means that, if you discover an old book buried in your garden, I'm the man to dig it up. I've also joined the drama society and am currently rehearsing the part of a drunkard in The Taming of the Shrew, I really don't know where to go for inspiration for this one! I suppose one place would be the party I went to last Saturday, where I was apparently last seen swigging absinthe straight from the bottle and generally researching my role in a very 'method acting' kind of a way (note to my hosts: that's what I was doing, honest!).
I'm now going to clear out the back shed, start a five gallon kit of home-brew beer and then, wait for it, go to the pub.

Notes on studying Endgame by Samuel Beckett:
HAMM: The waves, how are the waves?
CLOV: The waves? [He turns the telescope on the waves] Lead.
ECCLES: He's fallen in the waaaater.

Carina didn't go to the School Disco, but, if she had, she may well have looked like this. We did, however, go to the freshers' fair where, surprise surprise, we got drunk and Carina got a job as a babysitter. Later on I fell over.

As I'm embarking on a three year degree course in English I thought I'd better start at the beginning:

The cat sat on the mat, it was black (variations).

The cat, whose ebony hue echoed the polished jet of the ornaments on the mantlepiece above it, crouched, a picture of feline alertness, upon the genteely faded persian rug.

Its distress was so great that it was scarcely aware of being a cat, the loathsome carpet spread around it, a woven sea that threatened every moment to drown it, to extinguish its very catness.

He felt that he would explode with satisfaction at any moment, he could still feel the unctuous texture of the cream, still taste the sharpness of the fish, even the rough fibre of the hearthrug against his buttocks brought a tinge of pleasure to him.

Cat, mat, get over it

The pattern of the carpet evoked horned demons, they swirled and changed in ways that he had never imagined to be possible, he felt that his whole body was distorted, elongated as a tribute to El Greco, shrieking like the high note of a tenor sax in a low dive at three o'clock in the morning, blown on the winds high above the sleazy city; he was a cool cat and he was black.

Someone had told him the authorities were looking for him, he didn't know whether it was true, it scarcely seemed to matter. He knew he should take some sort of action, run away, hide, something, but he felt himself transfixed, unable to move from the cursed black mat upon which he sat.

Just completed the Mature Students' Induction process at Liverpool University, where the Hugh Baird contingent made their presence felt in no uncertain terms. Special mention goes to Jen, who had to leave a lecture half-way through to throw up because she was Horribly Hungover, not bad considering the course hasn't even started yet. Next week is the proper freshers' week, when us wrinklies are let loose on the poor bloody school leavers and attempt to share our mature and responsible attitude towards our studies with any of them who are silly enough to listen. After that there's apparently some stuff involving lectures and assignments and stuff like that, how hard can it be? Finally, a message to the knobheads who jemmied the door of my allotment shed last night: Why? You didn't even bother to steal anything, what were you expecting, jewellery, a stash of coke? It's where I keep my bloody shovel you halfwits.

The experiment in self-sufficiency that is our allotment is comming on better than I ever expected: less than 3 months after starting we are starting to see results. The first of the potatoes are ready and I made a pan of scouse with them (dead nice la). I've made a batch of damson jam that looks rather good considering I've never made jam before and a couple of jars of damson gin are steeping away and should be ready for Christmas. There's also lots of spinach and rocket and yesterday I pulled the first beetroot: I made a beetroot and rocket salad, steamed the leaves with some spinach and served them with lamb chops and sauteed potatoes. I'm bringing the enthusiasm of the recent convert to this project; it really is so good to eat food that you've produced yourself, maybe I should see if I can find a vacant croft somewhere in the Scottish highlands and take the whole experience to its logical conclusion (or maybe I'll just go to the pub and have a few pints until I calm down).

Some nights I have incredibly vivid dreams that have nothing to do with sex: any Freudians out there might like to see what they make of this:
Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and one other politician were having some sort of lads' weekend away and were drinking copious quantities of red wine and generally larking about; at some point Robin Cook decided to have a cup of coffee and brewed himself one. As he was tipping the grounds into a sink waste disposal unit I became aware that they were staying in the home of a very rich and powerful man who was some sort of zoologist and that the house contained his extensive collection of specimens. It also came to me and, apparently, to Mr. Cook that he had made his coffee in a jar containing one of these specimens and so he reached into the disposal unit to retrieve it and pulled out a severed zebra's tail which he stared ruefully at.
The scene then changed to a large underground chamber with metal walls, the floor covered in festering rubbish (in retrospect very similar to the death star's garbage dump in Star Wars, but I stray into geekdom), a number of dishevelled figures wandered about aimlessly. Rushing frantically between these figures was a man in a tattered zebra suit; tailless and covered in coffee grounds, as he reached each one he demanded of them, in tones near to hysteria, whether they knew what day of the week it was. The dream then jumped ahead and zebra man had established himself as leader, found himself a blazing torch and organised the others to explore the chamber, which was now very large indeed and contained many pillars and other vague structures. As the group came round some sort of screen they found a modern office layout, with a number of people sitting at workstations with computer terminals and the like; as the explorers walked amongst them, staring and making disparaging comments, the workers pointedly ignored them, although it seemed obvious that this required some effort. Eventually zebra man appeared to lose patience and exclaimed, very loudly:
"They say we're fucking rubbish but these peoples' jobs are even worse!"
The group were still ignored and carried on to the end of the office where, on the desk of a rather stern looking lady, they found a theremin and began to play about with it, producing horrible wailing noises. As the noise grew worse it became clear that the office workers could not continue to ignore them and that something decisive was about to happen and, sure enough, I woke up.

NB The Theremin is a rather unusual electronic musical instrument, you can find out all about it at Theremin World.

The tragic events in New Orleans struck a particular chord as I was there for a holiday three years ago. We stayed in a hotel about a mile from the town centre that ran an hourly minibus service to the French Quarter but one morning decided to walk in through the somewhat dilapidated suburbs in between. Nothing untoward happened but everyone we told about our little stroll was horrified and stressed what a rough neighbourhood it was; I just thought "Yeah, I'm from Liverpool, I know about rough." A couple of days later I bought the local paper, the Times Picayune and found it similar to any local paper in the UK except for one small difference: the middle section of ten or fifteen pages was devoted entirely to closely-spaced passport sized photos of the suspects in that week's rapes and murders. I have heard it claimed since, and this bears out my own experience, that the Big Easy was second only to Bogota for murders. The point I'm trying to make is that the scenes of violence amongst the survivors were pretty much business as usual, it's just that no-one else cared until there was a juicy natural disaster to bring in the press. While I'm on the subject: it's a disgrace that so many of the people who were too poor to get out before the storm struck were black, but not nearly so much of a disgrace as the fact that anyone is that poor in the richest nation the world has ever known.

So I'm going to make an entry Every Day OK? Well some days nothing happens and other days so much happens that there's no time to faff about with the bloody computer and other days I just can't be bothered (do I look bothered?). Today I have reinstalled all the software into my machine because I got drunk and thought it would be a really good idea to format the C drive (actually I was trying to install windows XP but it got three quarters of the way through the installation and then hung - in exactly the same place three times on the run - thanx a bunch Bill). Once I've done that I'm going to the pub and then I'll just see what happens from there. Pip pip.

Just a short entry to report on last night's outing by the Access class of '05 to Flanagan's Apple in the historic Cavern Quarter of Liverpool to see the lovely and talented Anita perform on the squeeze box (so to speak). A good time was had by all and if you click here you can view the photos to prove it.

OK, this is it; this is the final time that I say 'I am going to start keeping this blog up and not just chucking up an entry twice a year.' (Yeah yeah). I'm currently enjoying the long summer holiday after completing the Access to FE course at Hugh Baird College, I managed to pass (with distinction!) and have achieved a long-held ambition by being accepted for a combined English Language/Literature Degree at Liverpool University. I say enjoying, but the length of the break took me a bit by surprise; I'd worked hard to finish my coursework and pass the final exams and I welcomed the chance to chill out for a while but, once chilled to the point of frostbite, I noticed that there were still more than two months to go before I started Uni. 'Get a Job!' you cry in unison (that's in D flat, you on the left), but this is Liverpool, with a tight labour market, and I am middle aged with no qualifications, which is why I'm going to university at the age of 47 in the first place: also I will not work in a call centre; my soul is not for sale.

One thing that keeps me busy is my allotment: 2800 square feet of wilderness that I have been attempting to tame with the help of the redoubtable Linda (my partner only in the sense that we run the plot between us, she would doubtless want me to stress). Having started in mid June, we now have about a quarter of the available land fit for agriculture and have planted potatoes, beetroot, butternut squash, carrots, lollo rosso & rocket, all of which are doing surprisingly well. The big news, however, is not the plants' development but mine; after a particularly taxing session of digging I massaged my aching forearm and discovered that it had become unusually hard and resilient: not, as I first thought, some horrid agrarian malady but the advent of muscles!

Musically speaking, I bought The Understanding by Royksopp, the Scandinavian electronica merchants, and just love it; sort of like Air with Fjords. I also got the truss rod of my old Ovation tightened and keep meaning to set aside an hour a day to practice (sometimes I think the road to hell is paved exclusively with my good intentions). In the literary sphere, I read Michael Marshall's latest, Blood of Angels, a properly scary serial killer yarn involving ancient secret societies and the like: I know it's old hat but he does it so well. Then, when I was making one of my regular sweeps through the local charity shops, I found a copy of Hothouse, an early book by Brian W. Aldiss, which I hadn't read for so long that I'd forgotten the story. So, I'm reading the Aldiss book and listening to Royksopp and it suddenly occurs to me that, when I first read the book thirty-odd years ago, I was probably listening to something very similar, possibly Tangerine Dream; ce plus ce change eh?

It seems to me that the first step on the path to wisdom must be to accept that you know nothing, but this raises further problems that must be tackled before further progress can be made. If I truly know nothing then how can I interpret the world around me? Surely some sort of basic set of suppositions must underpin even the most rudimentary appreciation of my surroundings? If, on the other hand, I base my explorations on spurious assumptions made even though I have accepted that I have insufficient information to form them, how can I ever hope to move on? Shortly after writing the above I noticed a series of brown stains on the hall carpet and realised, after a brief investigation, that the second step on the path to wisdom involved treading in dogshit.

OK so its been far too long since I posted an entry here and my new government resolution is to make this a proper blog and keep it up to date (New Labour were returned with a greatly reduced majority in yesterday's general election).

Well, I'm still on the Access course, doing well and am due to finish on 9th June, just the small formality of the final exams and I'm home and dry. I've got a place at Liverpool University to study combined English Language and Literature in September so the plan is I'm going to make this a mature student's diary (that always makes me smile; I'm 46 years old and I can't detect much in the way of maturity). Anyway, there's the good intentions, let's see how it goes.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Phew! Where did that year go, are they making them shorter these days? Still cracking on with the Access Course, rather enjoying it, in fact, and finding that my creative energy is going into that rather than web-based Tomfoolery. I'm slowly putting more stuff onto the Portfolio page as I find it down the back of various items of furniture and scan it onto the machine. I'm also working on a Flash-based navigation system which I hope to have up and running soon. Must rush...

I've just completed my first week as a student at Hugh Baird College, I've signed up for an Access course studying English Literature, Psychology and History. Hopefully this will lead on to a place at one of the Liverpool Universities doing English Literature next year. I don't seem to have a lot of time for blogging as the standard of essays required appears to have risen since I began my gap quarter century, "Feed you head" as Grace Slick famously remarked.

Even those of us who work from home must eventualy concede that Christmas is over

Just when you've beaten one damn year another one comes along

Well here we are then, well into the 21st century and still no jet cars or holidays on the moon, although the rise of PCs is a bit of a technological marvel. Apropos of absolutely nothing: in 1986 I did some work for IBM at their new and very expensive golfball typewriter factory in Holland, built in the sure and certain knowledge that no-one would ever use a computer just to write letters.
I'm starting a long-delayed project to turn this site from an adjunct of my web design course and into something else altogether, although I have no idea what that might be.

Happy New Year

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot

And he's thinking: All this world is but a play and we go on, night after night, generation after generation, civilisations rising and falling in the glare of the celestial spots. And each performance is the same except that, every now and again, a piece of scenery falls over or an actor forgets his lines and throws in an ad lib and these accidents we measure and applaud as progress. The question is: How do you make a mistake on purpose?.
And he's transfixed by the footlights and the audience is dimly visible beyond them, a rough wash of grey tones on a coarse canvas, and he doesn't know why he's there or what's expected of him and he thinks: How fucking clichéd, and he walks away.
And later, on a high mountain, he breathes the clear, cold air and fancies himself at peace until it comes to him that that, too, is pretension, and he makes his way slowly and sadly back down into the valley.

It's always refreshing to discover that everything you know is wrong, and the tale of my research into my family history follows a familiar path : Way back in my misty pre-net youth I remember my father telling me that our family came from French nobility; more specifically from a quartermaster with William the Conqueror's army back in 1066. As a mildly amusing subtext to this romantic tale I always supposed that the name must have come from the French pingouin, or penguin which, again, comes from the Latin pinguis: fat or rich (and not in the sense of the word rich that I aspire to either). In my younger days I took a perverse pride in embellishing this further and explaining to anyone who asked about the origin of my name (and, as any other Pingueys will know, many people do) that it sprang from a Medieval French slang term meaning Fat and Drunken (although I have always been quite skinny).
The only reference I could find to back up the French Connection was a record of the Marriage of a French Huguenot by the name of Françoise Le Pinguey sometime in the mid seventeenth century, but I was still caught up with the pingouin notion and was consequently convinced that this was a nickname rather than a surname; I must say being entered on your marriage certificate as Françoise the Fat must be a bit of a blow to the self esteem.
Anyhow, I tracked down a far more likely source of the name, certainly for the branch here in Liverpool: a trawl through the online records from Cumbria reveals a dynasty of pig farmers who first appear as Pigney (for fairly obvious reasons) in the early nineteenth century then, probably due to a cavalier attitude to spelling way back then, transform into Pingeys and finally, around the end of the nineteenth century, slip a 'U' into the name for no apparent reason and mutate into the Pingueys.

So far so good; in response to the first version of this page I was contacted by Steve Pinguey from Cumbria who has been doing some serious work on the subject and has compiled a very impressive Family Tree in the process. He disabused me surprisingly gently of my theory that he is part of a dynasty of pig farmers (sorry Steve) and informed me that all the evidence points to the original theory of the family originating in France; possibly taking their name from the Picquigny region of Picardy rather than any sort of sizeist slander. The earliest record Steve has found is of Robert Pingney who was a monk at Holme Cultram Abbey and got his share of the silver and set up as a farmer when Henry VIII dissolved the monastery.
Steve's Family Tree is available for Download as a 44K Excel file with the password mark, anyone with any corrections or additions to the document is invited to contact Steve.