Anyway. 2010. after the disaster of 2009, I’ve had a pretty uneventful year. Work is still work, I’m still single, and somewhere along the line, I’ve managed to save money and lose a bit of weight. Yay. Let’s get underway with… 2010 in pictures! I’ll try to choose, wherever possible, my favourite pic of the month which I’ve not put on here previously.

JANUARY 2010

The year started as it ended, with snow. And lots of it. Probably the most snow I’ve seen since I was a wee nipper. For the first week, I don’t think there was a day where there wasn’t some snow on the ground.

I strugged through the freezing conditions, however, to see Accidents By Design play their last ever gig at The Studio…

Somebody should really sack my cameraman.

FEBRUARY 2010

A month where, quite literally, nothing happened. For the first time in a long while, the entire monthly archive fitted on one page. I don’t know why I linked to it, because it’s not really worth reading, unless you want to know more about “ass knives”. In this month, I took 5 photos, and 3 of those were of the local hospital…

I got paid for use of the pic, so it’s not all doom and gloom! The removal and replacement of the ancient streetlights on Lancaster Road and Clarence Road also began…

MARCH 2010

The month of long walks, and the month where I broke my Acer camera…

As mentioned in the previous month, the remaining old columns from Lancaster Road, and Clarence Road, got removed. Andy The Iridium fan saved one of the lanterns for my collection. Awesome!

Also, for some unknown reason, my right foot started giving me a hell of a pain. There was no rhyme or reason behind it. I hadn’t jarred it, sprained it, anything. It wasn’t even swollen…

APRIL 2010

This shall be the month that is recognised solely for my change in hairstyle. Or rather, the admission that I am indeed, going rather bald…

A trip to Jedburgh also saw me break my personal camera-to-flickr record of 11 minutes, though it did involve me knowing where there was a good, free wi-fi connection, and lugging the laptop in the back of the car with me. It was six months ago. It seems so primitive. I also stole a chilli from Tesco.

MAY 2010

Just looking at the thumbnails in this months collection brings back fond, and harrowing, memories.

Let’s start of with the fond…

And then move onto the harrowing….

Those photos are, of course, the aftermath of the “huge wasp” incident of 2010. There’s at least one of these a year, and I always almost end up with brown streaks running down the back of my leg. I used two cans of fly-killer to take care of this little bastard. I’d have loved to have been able to get better photos on it, but the “delivery” of my little Canon didn’t take place until May 27th.

Despite the whole new camera situation, the biggest change had to be the construction of a new door for the off-shot. I’m not sure which I enjoyed more, the manual labour, of the fact that me and Daddykins actually did something together for once.

JUNE 2010

I’m really struggling to think of something exciting that happened in this month. I lost my headphones in a field. Twitter was dominated with ITV’s shocking coverage of the World Cup, awful weather, and a half-cooked chicken lying in the middle of Warren Road…

This was the only time in the whole year I played darts.

The rest of the year continued, with a faint glimmer of hope that something exciting may happen… you’ll need to wait for Part 2, which should be on here some time tomorrow…

(EDIT: fixed broken photo…)

I woke up on Xmas day on,y to find that someone had sneaked into Mercuryvapour Towers during the night, and poured molten lava directly into my trachea, which means when I finally woke up, I had a pair of lungs that were on fire with every breath. Well, that is, if I could get a decent breath in between the coughing.

So, the whole day was spent, moping around the house, feling sorry for myself. There were good parts to it, however. As Daddykins was having dinner somewhere else, he got me a lovely piece of pork, which I demolished. I didn’t watch much telly, just caught up on a few things, and by something like 10PM, I was in bed, after only managing 1 can of lager. I must have been ill.

I fell asleep, knowing that things were only going to get worse. Indeed it did. I remember some pretty crazy dreams ‘n’ shit

I awoke, still coughing like a maniac, but this time part of my inner ear had been removed, as I could barely stand up straight. Everything hurt. I went for a piss. The afore-mentioned lava had now made its way out of my lungs, and was being drained out of my bladder.

Literally, the entire day was spent on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, with only the coughing keeping me awake. The highlight of the day was the epic tea Daddykins cooked, which included his first liberal use of cayenne pepper. Delicious!

It’s now 3:25AM on the morning after Boxing day. Dare I say I’m feeling a bit better? Every so often though, I know my lungs are going to collapse into spasms, and I’m going to be rolling around the floor, coughing them up…

I’ll tell you what, I’m even lazier than I was last year, as the whole of the above paragraph was copied and pasted from last years’ blog entry, and I’m sure that this trend will continue, expect to see this paragraph in the introduction for the 2011 Xmas blog entry too…

Unforuntely, unlike last years blog entry, I don’t have a draft ready to publish, nor do I have a a long string of drunken text I’d written several months earlier on the subject of Cliff Richard. Instead, you have me, sat at home, after the most pointless shift at work ever, drinking from room-temperature cans of Fosters, waiting for the TV to vacate, so I can put something I want on.

I’d like to wish both of my readers a very merry Xmas, and if I don’t get chance to speak to them personally before the new year, all the best for 2011. In fact, why do we say that? Why do we wish them best wishes for 20xx? Why not wish them all the best for every year of their lives and just get it over with?

It’s also time to break out this classic…

EDIT: Clearing out my comment spam queue (which is still growing in size, annoyingly, but at least the emails have stopped being sent), I found this corker of a joke… “I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.”.

And on that note, what type of motorbike does Santa ride? A Holly-Davidson.

Merry fucking Xmas…

I’d just like to wish both of my readers all the best for 2010, and that the next 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes brings you everything you wish for!

2010, for me, brings a new start. A new emphasis on life, perhaps. The beginning of the end of blogging, definitely. All of the blog posts pre 2008 have now been removed from the site. There have been many things happening over the past 9 years, which I have documented in great detail, and although they have been a good reference over the years, there’s no point keeping hold of the past, and there’s certainly no need to publish it for the world to see.

I no longer enjoy blogging. It’s a chore. I’ve not enjoyed it for a good while now. It’s fine when I have something to type about, like a day out, but when it involves some of the cack I’ve typed about in the past 6 months, it just seems altogether pointless, especially when I look at myself in the mirror and see myself growing older by the minute. Life, as Ronan Keating would say, is a rollercoaster. Maybe it’s time I started sharing the rollercoaster with just the people I care about.

JULY 2009

I’ll try to keep this short, and I’ll probably fail miserably. Following on from my earlier sunburn issues, I thought I’d make the situaltion worse by going back out in the sun and attending the Hartlepool dockfest, in order to get some photos. The photos were successfully obtained, but after waiting in a queue for at least an hour for what I thought was goingto be an action packed opening ceremony, it turned out to be the worst thing I’ve waited for in the whole history of anything ever. Infortunately, the damage was done, and I spent the rest of the two days walking around like an embarrased lobster. the fact I was wearing a bright white t-shirt never really helped matters.

Mid July was next, and I happened to be pointing the camera out of the window, to record the black clouds on the horizon, as shown in this photo, the first time it’s been shown.

OK, technically, those clouds aren’t on the horizon, neither were the clouds directly above my head. I was personally depressed about the fact that I hadn’t gone abroad this year. There were a few reasons behind this that couldn’t be changed, but I still felt that it was something to do with me, and spent a good few days moping about it. Obviously this was infinitely insignificant compred to what was about to happen.

Maybe there is such a thing such as fate? The day that we were “due” to go away (as in, the day that we’d gone away on the previous two years, and originally planned to this year), my dad suffered a heart attack. At this point, I went into “offline mode”, meaning that the rest of July was totally written off.

The Google car did visit Hartlepool too.

AUGUST 2009

Computer problems dominated August, with Beastbits constantly switching off. I thought I’d found the cause of the problem after inspecting the video card in Beastbits, and its broken fan. In this never-before-seen photo, you can see that the lead on the graphics card had became disconnected.

Actually, you can’t. That’s a really shit photo.

I didn’t do much in August. I was still off work for the first few weeks. I had only been back at work a few days, when we all learned about the sudden death of Stu, the security guard, of a heart attack. After what had happened in the weeks previous to that, it hit home. Hard.

On a lighter note, I met up with Chad the prolific troller who haunts this site with witty anecdotes (sarcasm), and long forgotten, often embarrasing memories of our childhood. Saying that, it was nice to see him after all of these years.

SEPTEMBER 2009

Quite literally, nothing happened in September. There were a few site issues, and a day trip to York. That really is it. There’s nothing in either the blog archive or my flickr account to show that anything happened at all.

OCTOBER

The occasional site problems continued into October, though the whole month appeared to be dominated by a hunk of metal and magnets. Yes, that was the month where that bloody Samsung hard drive arrived, and spent a good few days trying to get it working.

Photograph-wise, it was even more barren than September, with a mere 91 photos being uploaded to flickr, though one of these was part of my “bargain of the century”…

I went to a radio rally with Daddykins, and met one of my Flickr contacts, which was nice. I also got “knocked back” at Asda, and no matter how cheap their buns were, the humiliation meant I never returned there for over two months.

NOVEMBER

The flickr meet I attended at the Historic Quay was the highlight of the month, even though there were only a few photos that were actually any good. It was good to get the camera out for the first time since September and actually get some shots took. My computer problems officially ended when I gave Beastbits the right royal kicking it deserved, and it is now an ex-machine – its parts used to update and repair the scribcam.co.uk server.

The old video card from the server was a bit broken…

… well, it was after I’d finished with it. The new machine gave me my first glimpses of Windows 7, and… well, it’s not Vista, so that’s a plus point, I suppose.

DECEMBER

December has seen something we don’t usually se a lot of this time of year – snow. It also became the month where it occured to me, that I am officially old.

You are officially old, the second you look out of the window, see snow, and instead of jumping up and down like a kid, you slowly turn away from the window and think “If I go out in that, I’m going to break something”. Instead, I stayed in the confines of Mercuryvapour Towers, and took plenty of photos of it.

It takes a lot to get something hanging from a wheely bin to look insanely festive, but I think this manages it quite nicely…

Although at the time of typing, it’s actually Xmas Eve (thanks to the wonderment of scheduled posts, you’ll be seeing this a couple of days later), I doubt anything else is going to happen within that time, so this leaves me to wish both of my readers a very happy 2010, and I hope that it’s a much better year than what 2009 was.

The sooner 2009 ends, the sooner I can get on with life, and start afresh…

JANUARY 2009

The first proper post saw me killing off the video blogs. They were unpopular and embarrassing. I took the first of a handful of walks throughout the year, and documented it with photos. Work continued to get me down, for reasons I can’t think of, and I survived the great Google outage. The first death of 2009 came in the form of my 4Gb memory stick, which succombed to a shorted out USB port…

FEBRUARY 2009

It snowed a little, more than once. JT moved onto the other rotation, and I started blethering on about creating backups using Clonezilla. Unfortunately, this was not going to be the last long-winded post about my computer experimentations. In fact, this seemed to be the whole theme of the year. Work started on building houses on the vacant land on Warren Road, despite it being heavily landscaped only a few years before, no doubt at great cost to the Hartlepudlian taxpayer.

Dick Brown, webmaster of www.dick-brown.com (the w’s stand for wankstain) received an insanely full bottle of orange squash.

MARCH 2009

An entirely forgettable month, if I’m honest. I worked overtime for only the second time in my life, and I went to Durham with Chris at some point, to give my camera its first test. I ended up misjudging a step and twatting my knee off the floor. The cooler on the sarnie machine also malfunctioned, casuing it to display “HEALTH CONTROL” on its VFD display.

APRIL 2009

April 1st consisted of vast amounts of kitchen cleaning. April 4th consisted of my Grand National faux pas, and mercuryvapour.co.uk once again moved servers.

A bird took residence in Mercuryvapour Towers, and it became apparent that nobody reads this blog anymore.

MAY 2009

Unperturbed about the bad news regarding the blog “statistics”, I still continued to write. On May 7th, Andy The Iridium Fan donated the second mercury lantern into my streetlighting collection, in the form of an unused Revo Prefect.

The biggest overhaul came towards the end of this particular month wne I took delivery of a new dartboard.

A lot of spare time was taken with this particular hobby from this moment on.

Dick Brown received some money from MS, on May 13th. I have no idea what for, but I was on-hand with cameraphone, to record the historic event…

JUNE 2009

So, everyone will be asking, where were you when he died? Yes, surely, the biggest, most famously untimely death of 2009, according to the mercuryvapour.co.uk super-statistic website generator, is…

Yes, sod Michael Jackson. This was the most untimely death for me anyway

Apart from death, June consisted of record breaking sunburn, after climbing Christchurch, and spending about an hour up there.

It really was crustier than it looked.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a sunburned scalp was to be the least of my worries, as July rearerd its ugly head… stay tuned for Part 2

Enjoy. I did!

I, once again, would like to wish both of my readers a very merry Xmas, I shall post something I wrote in August, but never actually finished. In fact, it never really got started, it’s just been sat in my drafts list for 4 months, and I’m sick of the sight of it…

You’ll probably find the following odd. I’m typing this in August, and here you are, reading this, some time near Xmas. Yes, I’ve got back into my old habit of stockpiling posts for later publication. this time I’m typing about Xmas records that aren’t really that bad.

The reason the idea of this post stuck into my head is that I’m currently listening to “Saviours’ Day” by Cliff Richard. It’s one of those songs which I secretly like (oh, OK, it’s not much of a secret anymore) for a number of reasons. The first was because it reminds of my Primary School days. At one of those pointless assemblies, one of the teachers plugged in the record player that was in one of the little seldom-used rooms off the assembly hall.Unfortunately, the speakers were either pathetic, or they didn’t reach across the room and into the main hall, as it was barely audible.

That actually sums up the effort I’ve put into the blog this year. Absolutely none. 2009 has been a pathetic year, and I shall close 2009 with the traditional 2-part review. I bet you can’t wait.

Sooo, where was I… Ah yes, I think we were up to June. And if we weren’t, then we bloody well are now.

JUNE

This was another month which featured some of my famously long walks around the local area. It was also the month where I last received a nettle sting. I hate those little bastards. Itch, itch, itch. Aaaargh. On the plus side, I did watch the sun come up whilst sat on a bale of hay. Which was nice.

My record collecting continued, and Steetley Chimney, once again, had smoke billowing from the top of it. Firefox 3 got released, and I had a plate of chips made from homegrown potatoes.

I’m actually struggling to think of things majorly exciting for June.

JULY

Well, July was, as you can probably predict, the month where I left the country for 1 whole week. Remember that nettle I mentioned earlier? well, that was nothing compared to the sunburn I suffered at the hands of the Parisienne sun. Doesn’t look bad in the pic, but the back of my neck and the top of my head were like glowing, peeling beacons, which could only be extinguished with the help of a hotel room shower.

Of course, going to Paris wasn’t the only thing I did in July. The week following it, I blogged about it in every spare moment of my time. Oh, I did also catch a bird whilst on a nightshift at Employment Palace.

AUGUST

The hard drive issues which had plagued by system for a good couple of months once again raised their ugly head. And, not only that, I couldn’t even do anything else to take my mind off it, because the weather, for the whole summer was beyond atrocious

Thankfully, it held out long enough for Andrew D to show me his new camera, and for me to have a play with it.

I also attended Eddie’s leaving do at some point, which also got rained on, but thankfully not rained off, even though the disco never actually materialised…

SEPTEMBER

It wasn’t long after seeing Andrew’s camera that I acquired my own, of the very same model. Only difference is that mine had a later firmware revision. This meant that the majority of the month was spent taking crap photos, and standing in the freezing cold, at 2AM in the morning, taking long exposures.

My first real trip out with the camera involved a walk around the Marina witha group of people I met on Flickr. I must admit the weather was shocking on the day, therefore the photos didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped. I was planning to use them as a set of photos I could practise my fine tuning on, but I never got round to it. Therefore, they shall remain on flickr’s servers for eternity looking grainy and washed out.

The summer had one last trick up its sleeve, however, and on Saturday 27th September, I went to York with Coatesy on what must have been one of the hottest days of the year. Some of the photos were nothing short of spectacular

OCTOBER

It’s hard to find words to describe October. “Slipped under the radar” is one phrase that springs to mind straight away. It’s as if nothing happened. I have a feeling this was because most of the time I was trying to ignore the (really quite nasty) infection in my finger. Turns out, however, I could “stands it no more”, and after trying to drain the infection with a drawing pin, followed by being almost in tears because of the pain, I took only my 2nd trip to the doctors. Annoyingly, I got fleeced out of money via the prescription charge, and I spent a pre-booked week off work completely sober. Sassen, fassen, and indeed, rassen.

A trip to Redcar to pick up some records went entirely well, meaning I came back with considerably more than what I went for. Including the little pot dog which I have since lost. Oh well.

NOVEMBER

The beginning of november saw me recovering from the afore-mentioned finger infection (and a hangover which I will never speak of again), but that was the last thing on my mind, as I headed off down to London to spend a couple of hours in the company of Clarkson, May and Hammond. I won’t link to any of the photos, as I will be the first to admit my photography on that day was complete and utter anus.

Again, this was another month that went entirely un-noticed until later on in the month, when on a journey down the shops, I got handed a piece of paper telling me that the streetlights were going to be replaced. Golly! I reported it in the only way I know how… take a photo.

To top it all off, we had a brief flurry of snow towards the end of the month, making everything look nice for just a few hours. And if there’s anything better than snow for cleaning dog shite off your shoe, I’ve yet to see it…

The month was concluded with an indian with 11 people from work in order to celebrate my 29th birthday a few days later.

DECEMBER

What a month. I barely had time to sit still. I had another week off work to start off with, as it coincided with my birthday. It also coincided with “something else” work related, which shall not be mentioned.

Many functions took place in December, including things I really should have blogged about. I had a great night at Sunderland dogs a few weeks ago, which didn’t even get a mention on here. In fact the only mention I gave it on here or flickr was a photo of a rebooting gambley…

That was just one of the many nights out I attended, and never blogged about, including a Saturday night “discussing” politics with a former schoolteacher of mine. I even missed a few other nights out, thanks to a shitty little cold I caught a few weeks ago, and still haven’t been able to fully shake off. Grrrrrrr.

So, that, in a rather large 1000+ word essay, wraps the whole of last year up. It is gone. Confined to history. The only sign of its very existence appears in the form of a calendar I received from a chinese takeaway. Oh, and my bletherings in here, I suppose.

If I were to sum up 2008 in one word, the answer to that is quite simply “wet”. I’ll be hard pressed to beat taking as many photos this year as I did last, but I’ll no doubt give it a go.

2009 is sure to bring more photos. Whether these are good or bad, I’ll find out in the remaining 363 days.

JANUARY

January started with a bit of a worrisome note. I thought I’d lost touch with Coatesy, after I sent him a Happy New Year text which never got delivered. I spent the new few weeks wondering what had happened to him. Turns out I’d sent the text to his old number, and on 25th January, I went round to his flat, and beat him at Track and Field

The 1st day of the year also saw the first photos uploaded to Andrew Dorrian’s Photo Gallery.

In Early January, the Shakespeare Pub, formerly the Catcote, was demolished to make way for a parade of shops, which are nearing completion.

Overall, I uploaded ony 16 photos to flickr, making it a very dull month photo-wise.

FEBRUARY

In contrast to the dullness of January, this month seemed to have everything, and that includes taking over 900 photos. For most of the month, however, I was the most depressed I’ve ever been over a stupid row about a packet of crumpets, and my even stupider anger. I’m quite sure the person involved will never truly forgive or forget it… I’m damn sure I’ll never forgive myself, or forget it.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and after being unable to sleep because of this incident, I got up before the cold winter sunrise, and walked to the headland to take some photos. Can you tell that I was crying when I took this picture? No? Good.

That was the incident which summed up the month for me. It wasn’t good, and it was all because of me.

Gary Smith left Employment Palace for pastures new.

It was certainly the month for unbelievable sunsets.

The streetlights on Easington Road FINALLY got replaced, after approximately a year of the new posts standing idle.

A little later on in the month, I went to Newcastle with Chris. Many photos were taken, including an almost exact copy of a image I’d seen on flickr many times…

Unfortunately, the longest Febrary for four years didn’t end with such an inspiring image. I had planned to take a catalogue of pictures, as it’s only something that happens every 4 years. Clearly this photo shoot never happened.

And I didn’t blog much. I did, however, blog about the earthquake which happened on February 27th. That was a very odd night.

MARCH

March’s blogs appear oddly to explain things that happened in February. Thanks to the afore mentioned crumpet incident. This included the trip to Newcastle in two mega blog posts, and also further detail about the earthquake.

A big brown envelope plopped on my doormat at some point in this month, I’d been summonsed for jury dury the following month. Balls. I took a bus ride to Middlesbrough to see how long it would take. Some shite photos were taken.

I also did a mega-tidy, which means that my carpet was seen for the first time in several years. It soon disappeared again. 317 photos were uploaded, none of them look particularly fascinating.

I also bought my first 500Gb hard drive.

APRIL

Early highlights of the month include the purchase of a 250Gb external hard drive, and my winning of several pounds on the Grand National.

The first major incident to occur was the major fire at the Bonne Bouche factory. Those were my photos, but you can never have enough photos of a major fire, so here is some that Andrew D took. He was lucky enough to have some of these printed in the paper.

Very little else happened which didn’t involve jury duty, hence very little blogging or photographs. However, during the weekend between my two weeks, I went to Durham with Chris. More photos were taken.

It was at this point (or around this point) that I started the record database, something whcih I’ve been building ever since.

Of course, there was the bus crash which demolished the brick bus shelter on Easington Road. Turns out April was quite a month for local stuff I could photograph. Humphrey Lyttleton also died, which was something I was truly gutted about.

MAY

This appears to be a month completely written off. Nothing happened apparently. I was sick of work as usual, and made my feelings felt in the only way I know how – blog about it. It was also the month of my mamoth walk around the town. I got plenty of photos, including some of my favourites of the year. Remember the new 500Gb HDD I’d purchased? Well, it began to die. Ironically, I mentioned that the power supply might have been at fault. I didn’t have that thought for another 5 months….

This is part 1… Part 2 to follow, hopefully this year.