PigPog

Part One – the National Television Awards

This was my big treat after the house was sold. A trip to the Big Smoke to meet some of my fellow rrrumpettes from Luigi’s, the place I while away many an evening squeeing over the brilliance of the TV show Ashes to Ashes and the charms of the insanely talented and really rather attractive actor Philip Glenister.

I travelled down to London on Wednesday morning, and met some of the girls at Paddington Station. We went off for lunch at the posh hotel I was staying in, where many a giggle was had at the expense of the poncy menu. “Noisettes of lamb with drizzle of jus? Bugger that, bring us fishcakes and chips!” And any excuse to throw in lines from the show – “LUIGI! Another bottle of your house rubbish! Grassy-arse!”

After lunch we headed over to the Royal Albert Hall, a mere two minute walk from my hotel. And that’s where I met the rest of the girls, and took up residence at our spot near the red carpet.

The Luigi’s Ladies are known by their trademark red balloons, each decorated with lines from the show. We are also known by our beverage of choice. As shown here by the lovely Gem:

It was a cold night, and it was recommended we all wrapped up warm, in lots of layers with a nice warm woolly coat on top. I swear this was the only outfit I could think of that was appropriate:

However, as the evening went on my bottle gradually went, so the tie and leather gloves were quickly dispensed with, and I went for my equally eccentric ATV t-shirt.

As darkness fell over the Royal Albert Hall and was replaced by the warming beam of the floodlights, the crowds built up with members of the public lucky enough to have tickets, and as time went on, the celebrities began to file in.

Fun as it was shouting for Ant & Dec, Babs Windsor and Paul O’Grady, we were there for one celeb and one celeb only, and after about an hour he arrived.

If you’re wondering how I reacted on seeing him “in the flesh” for the first time, I did stand there for a while, muttering “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod” over and over, calming down just before heading into “OMGOMGOMG!!!!111!!PONIEZ!!”. Just.

At this point I would like to offer a big bucket o’wispas and thanks to the wonderful neonsox, who told me to get in front of her because I hadn’t been before and I needed to get his autograph. So I was right at the barrier when he came over. I decided to get some snaps, and then hopefully an autograph. Snaps I managed, but he was being dragged away by his coat-tails after signing for the others, and having the obligatory kiss with genesgeni.

To which I responded “That’s three times now! You greedy bugger!”

We decided to wait it out through the show and see if we could catch him again on the way out. While the gongs were being handed out inside the Royal Albert Hall, we took a walk back to my hotel in time to see the Legend that is The Stig accept the award for best Factual programme on behalf of his minions.

Back at the barrier we waited on news of Philip’s category, Best Drama Performance. He didn’t win, losing out to David (insert expletive here) Tennant. It made us more determined to stay put and catch him again, to remind him that “a sizeable rump of intelligent women” still think he’s the best thing since sliced Bollinger.

In spite of aches and extreme cold I stayed with the girls and waited it out. It was worth it. When we spotted Philip’s wife, the adorable Beth Goddard, we called over and I managed to speak to her. I had with me the issue of Slimming World magazine I was featured in back in the summer, when we had our own special Man of the Year Party and I went dressed as Gene Hunt. Since Philip had headed straight off for the bar, I thought I’d ask Beth to sign it anyway, as it would still be a very nice motivational tool for the future. She read the little article that mentioned my 10 stone weight loss, looked over her should for Philip, and called him over.

“Have you got my wife?” He said as he approached us. Now, you’ll have to excuse me at this point. I can’t quite recall the actual words as I was just experiencing a massive squee overload, and when that sense is overloaded, other things get overlooked like hearing, and memory. I think Beth explained what the magazine piece was about, and then he signed. All I can remember is saying “Thank You” over and over and over and now, in hindsight, I’m somewhat concerned I sounded like Perry, friend of Kevin the Teenager… “Fank yoo Mister Glenister, I really like you on the telly…”

Having got exactly what I wanted, I didn’t see the point in hanging around on the off-chance I might catch another glimpse of Simon Cowell (surprisingly, quite a nice bloke). I floated on my squee cloud back to my hotel, and proceeded to empty the mini-bar until I got to sleep.

Coming up in Part Two – the Luigi’s Ladies tour Ashes to Ashes locations and indulge in a couple of re-enactments.

There is an opportunity to change the world for the better.  A chance to lift one person to their rightful place, head and shoulders above his contemporaries, getting the recognition he deserves for the work he’s done and to spur him on to continue.

So when you vote, vote right.

Vote for Philip Glenister for Best Drama Performance at the National Television Awards.

Oh, and as for that other vote thing… I’d go for Obama.  Seems like a nice bloke.

In the interests of keeping all my Slimming World ramblings in one place, I’ve started a new blog…

A Sizeable Rump! – Thoughts from a Slimmer’s World

… where I hope writing about my adventures regularly will help me stay on the wagon.

Just regular blog posts for now, but when I’m brave enough I’ll start doing video content so you can all see just how sizeable that rump of mine is, or hopefully, isn’t.

We went out for a fun walk today.  We started by heading down to the old railway line, which has been converted into a nice tree-lined walkway.  When we ran out of walkway there, we cut up the lane to join the Grand Western Canal, and back along there to the Ducks Ditty, for a couple of drinks with friends.

We started in heavy fog, which made all the cobwebs very visible. They were kind of pretty, but also a reminder of just how many spiders surrounded us. The sun came out later, though, and it turned into a nice warm day.

You can see all the photos from the trip in this gallery, but here are a some I particularly liked…

• See the full gallery.

It’s ten years ago today that we registered the domain pigpog.com.

We didn’t have a web site on it at first – it was mainly registered for the sake of having permanent email addresses, at a time when a few people were starting to block anything from webmail addresses as likely spam.

The earliest version of the site on Archive.org is from December 1999, when we thought we were funny.

I’ve experimented with a few different gallery plugins for WordPress, so we could host our photos over here, rather than just keeping them all on Flickr.  None of them quite did what I wanted, but I’ve just found NextGEN Gallery, and I’m quite impressed so far. It’s not the simplest to get set up, but there are lots of options, and it gives you a nice simple way of adding photos from your galleries into any post.

I usually upload photos to Flickr, then insert them into posts here to tell the ‘story’ of the day, event, etc., and I still wanted to be able to do that – most other galleries made that difficult. Most others also meant uploading photos one at a time. That’s not too bad if I’ve been out and taken three or four shots, but a bit of a pain if I have ten or so. For events like the Race for Life or the Slimming World Regional Finals, it would have been unusable. I’ve uploaded the Slimming World event photos to NextGEN, and adding 191 photos was quite easy. The upload stalled twice, but each time, just clicking the ‘upload’ button again continued from where it got stuck.

I’ll probably be tweaking and playing for a while yet, but feel free to have a look around the gallery – probably nothing you haven’t seen before if you visit much, just in a different format.

Oh, and it’s also running the random slideshow at the top-right corner of every page.

I stuck a few photos of our flat on Flickr when we first moved in, and I’ve just been notified that one of them is being used by a site campaigning against climate change on behalf of the German government. The second photo on that page is the storage heater in our spare room.

I use Creative Commons licenses for my stuff, which lets it be used in ways like this, but it’s always nice when someone lets me know when they’re using it.

Casey Kochmer’s A Personal Tao blog is the closest I get to spiritual guidance nowadays. It’s part of my daily reading list and is a good antidote to all the mental and emotional chaos I find myself experiencing from time to time. This morning’s post, a response to a set of questions from a student, contains a quote I ought to copy onto a card and carry with me to cut through the crap of those chaotic moments:

I teach many students but we must each must let the heart lead the way. The sooner you can find acceptance, to accept yourself as is, the less hassle you will have later in life to letting go of much of the bull shit we place on ourselves. I wish you peace in that journey of acceptance.

Here’s to letting go of the bull shit, finding acceptance and experiencing true peace. Happy October, everyone.