Some time ago, Stephen Lang had a meme where he looked at ten things beginning with a particular letter and shared his thoughts on them. I volunteered myself to have a crack at this. Having done it before with the letter T, I requested a different letter this time and ended up with A.

It’s taken me quite some time to get round to this, mostly because I was struggling to come up with things beginning with that letter, but here we go.

A is for…

Alien

This is one of my all-time favourite films. It’s a dark, brooding atmospheric science fiction horror film, with a mixture of tension building pieces (just where is that pesky alien critter?) and full on terror (the chest-burster scene).

It’s beautifully directed, wonderfully acted with amazing cinematography and sets and deserves to be recognised as an all-time cinema classic.

Alfred Trotter’s Moving Memorial

Note that this is Alfred Trotter, not Albert. This is a reference to my maternal great-grandfather, rather than a reference to anyone from Only Fools and Horses.

I did a certain amount of researching my family tree, and one part of this was going to find where Alfred Trotter was buried with my mother and her elder sister. Now we knew which cemetery he was buried in because my mother and my Aunt could remember going to visit the grave with their mother when they were little, but they weren’t exactly sure where in the cemetery it was.

The cemetery was Gateshead’s oldest cemetery — “East Cemetery” which opened in 1862 and is now officially “closed” as there are no more plots available. It was for a long time Gateshead’s most popular cemetery because — wait for it — people were dying to get in.

So there we were, wandering around and looking for the grave of Alfred Trotter, which was made a little more difficult by the lack of a headstone. What he did have was one of those vase things that you put flowers in, and the inscription was on that.

He’d also had little railings around his grave so that the vase thing would be easier to find, but unfortunately after the First World War did him the injustice of seeing him gassed (from which his lungs never really recovered and was listed on his death certificate as part of the cause of death), the Second World War did him the injustice of seeing his railings pinched in order that the metal could be used for the war effort. Talk about adding insult to injury!

Anyway, apparently the vase used to get moved when the people would cut the grass, and once the railings had gone there was no guarantee it would ever have been put back in the right place, so the three of us were just wandering around the cemetery scanning pretty much everything to see if we could see his vase.

We were beginning to give up and decided to have one last scout round a particular area. I was walking ahead and speaking quietly:

Come on, Alfred. Show me where you are. We’re not going to find you unless you show me where to lookMy quiet words

Now I hadn’t really expected a ghostly figure to rise from the ground and point the direction out to me — to be honest, I don’t really know what I had expected to happen but it seemed like there would be no harm in just asking, so I did.

And my eyes immediately tracked across to the right and up a bit, where they lighted on one of those vase things that I’d not spotted before. And sure enough, it was Alf’s. Now, when I say immediately, I don’t mean “within a couple of minutes”, I mean “as soon as I finished speaking”.

I’m not saying Alfred could hear me, communicate with me and point out his memorial to me. It could all have been coincidence. In fact, the likelihood is that it was all coincidence. However, it’s one of those things that I’m not prepared to dismiss out of hand and to me is suggestive of the possibility that some thing of the supernatural was pointing me in the right direction.

Which brings me to my next point…

Agnosticism

As someone with a scientific mind, I don’t for the most part see that an understanding of the world, or the universe, or how it all works, needs a creator or an afterlife in order to make sense. I also understand the credo that extraordinary claims (such as the one suggesting there’s an invisible bearded man who lives in the clouds and who we’re all going to live with when we die) require extraordinary proof before we can take them seriously scientifically.

On the flip side of this, I’ve come across the work of a number of scientists who reject out of hand evidence that seems to contradict their world view, regardless of the evidence presented. One example would be the scientist who rubbished Robert Sheldrake’s experiments with telepathy which showed that the chance of the possibility of those results having occurred purely by chance was billions to one against. The scientist simply rejected the results without being prepared to examine the evidence.

This sort of closed-mindedness is not science. A scientist should be skeptical but not closed-minded, and open-minded but not credulous. They should be prepared for experimental proof to demonstrate that what they previously believed may have been wrong.

But that’s by the by. What I’m really saying is that I’ve had a number of weird experiences — such as that memorial one — which I’m not prepared to entirely discount, and which unless I’m prepared to discount I can’t explain scientifically. Equally, there are other things — such as Sheldrake’s experiments which are suggestive that science may be wrong about other things, such as telepathy.

On the other hand, I know that as a thanatophobic (someone with an abnormal fear of death) I have a vested interest in wanting to believe, so I’m wary about my reasons.

But in the end it just boils down to me saying that I simply don’t know. I don’t know whether there is a God or Gods. I don’t know whether or not there is an afterlife. At some point in time, I’ll either find out — or I’ll simply never know (and that’s the problem with atheism — you’ll never have the satisfaction of knowing you were right!)

Accessibility

Accessibility (my definition) is the concept of making things that people are able to use, and use without too much difficulty. Therefore web accessibility is the concept of making web sites which are able to be used by different people without too much difficulty.

Different people have slightly different definitions here: some would say that web accessibility relates only to making websites easily operable by people with disabilities; others would say it relates to making websites easily operable by people with disabilities and people using a wide range of technologies — older browsers and so on. I’m in the second camp, but I’m not going to go into this in much more detail because I’ve been over this argument numerous times before.

My passion for accessibility (particularly in the sense of making sites operable by people with disabilities) relates pretty much directly to my passion for fairness. I believe in equality of opportunity. I believe everyone should be treated fairly regardless of gender, ethnicity, cultural background, sexual preference, disability, religion and/or favourite amphibian.

To me, web accessibility is both a natural extension of a belief in equalities, and a natural extension of my belief that if you’re going to do something, you ought to do it properly.

As part of this sub-category of Accessibility, I should really also give a mention to two more A’s in this area that I have involvement with: Accessites, a showcase for accessible websites with articles about accessible design, and AccessifyForum, the forum for all of your accessibility-related questions.

Authors

As someone who reads a lot it’s only natural that I think about authors and about writing styles now and again. I’m not going to use this an opportunity to single out any authors or writing styles in particular.

Instead, what I’m going to do is to suggest that anyone who blogs regularly, and has been doing so for a number of months, may well have written a novel’s worth of words.

That’s not to suggest every blogger could write a novel — in many ways blog posts suggest themselves, whereas to write a novel there’s a lot more in the way of characterisation and plot required. All I’m basically saying is that bloggers can write, and some of them can write well.

I get fed up with lazy journalists (perhaps worried about their own job security) who spend their time being critical of bloggers and blogging and implying it’s all a load of tosh. Sure, many blogs and bloggers are just a load of tosh, but you’ll find exactly the same with journalists. The better ones will be more successful than the crap ones. It’s as simple as that.

Aaaaanyway, I’m thinking of launching a Fiction category to share some of my short stories with the world — if you’re into this sort of thing you’ll notice that Mike Cherim has a fiction category already so I wouldn’t be the first.

I’m already working on a couple of short stories, but as I’m planning to submit them to the Gateshead short story competition, I’m not allowed to publish them here until after that competition is over, so there may be a pause before my fiction starts appearing.

On the other hand, I don’t want to bombard everyone with short stories they don’t want to read, so please do let me know whether or not this sounds of interest…

Acting

Something else you may not know is that I am a classically trained actor. Well, I say classically trained, what my acting training actually consists of is a pair of NEOCN certificates in Acting Techniques — at grades 2 and 3.

I’m not sure exactly where this puts me in the overall acting scale: I’ve not been nominated for an Oscar yet, so I guess I’m slightly down from De Niro, Pacino et al but presumably I’m rated slightly higher than the actors on the daytime soaps.

My only actual performance to date was as a member of the Progressive Players, in the Little Theatre on Low Fell, during their run of Close The Coalhouse Door. This was a musical about the history of mining in the North East, and in particular the story of the mine workers and their struggles for better conditions and so on. Indeed, in one seminal moment, my brutish policeman was sent to ask some strikers:

Will ye gan back to work?Close The Coalhouse Door

… shortly before they didn’t go back to work, remained on strike and their child died. Unpleasant, but not inaccurate.

However for some reason I didn’t receive the call from Spielberg asking me to star in his latest blockbuster, and with moving away from Low Fell, I’ve now cut my ties with the theatre so my undoubted talents (I remembered my words, stood in the right places and said my words at the right times) are now probably sadly lost to the nation.

It was bloody good fun though. Okay, the theatre only holds about two hundred people, and there were only seven performances, but it’s not often you get the opportunity to appear on stage with a full brass band (also on the stage) providing your musical accompaniment…

Alcohol

Where do I begin? I’ve always been quite a fan of alcohol, and various alcoholic beverages, ranging from Marston’s Pedigree (my staple pint) to Orkney Dark Island (my favourite pint) through single malt whiskies, Atomic shooters (ow!) and a whole range of alcopops.

Indeed, I’m off out for a drink tonight for a colleague’s birthday. Obviously, I’ll be making cracks about his age, and suggesting that when he was first old enough to drink, they already had an equivalent of alcopops — mead.

And, for those of you who haven’t noticed yet, those css background images of molecules dotted about the right hand side of my page are stylized representations of the ethanol molecule.

Go on, hands up those who hadn’t noticed.

Anthrax

I’m speaking here about the skate-punk-metal band Anthrax who have produced a lot of classic tracks and used a lot of Judge Dredd imagery on their t-shirts, as opposed to the unpleasant and often fatal disease relating to anthrax spores.

I don’t particularly know why I mentioned them, other than the fact they begin with ‘A’, they are a band I like, they (along with Public Enemy) produced one of the songs that defined my student years: Bring The Noise was one of several songs I’d use to get myself in the mood to go out, drink large quantities of the alcohol and jump around a lot at a Rock club.

Ah, those were the days…

Arsepot

A possibly unusual choice here, with the word “arsepot”. I only really have a very tenuous connection with this word, which is as follows…

About nine or ten years ago, a friend of mine was going out with someone. This girl’s father apparently used to use the word “arsepot” as an expletive. I remember this because I caught my friend saying it once and asked him for an explanation.

It struck us both as quite a nice expletive. It’s sufficiently plosive to get a certain about of venom into it, yet it can also be said more softly if required, and on the overall offensiveness scale, it’s not going to upset too many people.

It’s just a good, all round, all-purpose swear word, and one that I’ve chosen to share with you all. Note that it’s sufficiently flexible to describe a person or a thing — “he’s a bit of an arsepot”, but also something that you can use on its own as an expression of dismay if necessary — “Arsepot!”.

There you have it. Arsepot. Enjoy.

Anniversaries

Another word that begins with A and an excuse to tell you some of the more significant numbers that will relate to me later on in 2007.

• I’m going to be 32
• My children will be 4 and 2
• My fifth wedding anniversary is in September
• My wife and I will have been together for six years in June
• I will reach my second anniversary as a blogger towards the end of the year

And there you have it. Ten things beginning with the letter A, which turned out a little wordier than I had intended. If you want to join in, leave a comment asking for a letter, and I’ll select a letter for you.