01/28/11

Farewell Honda

I’m not a sentimental person. I have a few things I’ve kept such as cards from when I left Peterborough or nice e-mails people have sent me but I don’t really become attached to things…especially cars.

I’m proud to say that I’ve never named a car nor really thought of it beyond something that’s practical and a way of getting from a to b…in fact most people will either refer to my choice in car as ‘grandad’ or ‘very Mark’…neither of which is a compliment!

However last week my trusty Honda Civic which I’ve been driving for over 4 years met it’s end as I managed to drive it into another car…whilst the damage looked pretty minimal my insurance company wrote it off and as I said a farewell to the car yesterday (raiding the tax disc and stereo from it) I started reflecting on it.

Before my Honda I had a Fiat Uno (cheap to fix and a great laugh but ultimately not very good) followed by a Peugeot 306 which led to my hate of french cars and so moving onto the Honda was a step up.

In the Honda I had a car I could rely on…I didn’t have to worry about it starting or breaking down because it was a Honda.

Beyond all the technical stuff the Honda represented some great parts of my life…

For example it was the Honda that me and Jo drove in on our first date.

The Honda saw me cover hundreds of miles between Norfolk & Peterborough, occasionally Peterborough & Sheffield and more recently South Cave and Sheffield as me and Jo drew closer (geographically and emotionally) before getting married.

The Honda took us on a mile round trip to Italy without failing once…and last year it took us to France and back.

The Honda has seen it all and so whilst it’s obviously time for a new car (which I pick up on Tuesday) it’s also sad to see a car with such fantastic memories linked to it go.

So much so it warranted a blog post.

Farewell Honda…you’ve been awesome

01/7/11

2011: Web, Music & Writing

So it’s almost a week since we began 2011 and so far it’s been a pretty good year! For me 2010 was great…beyond the obvious highlight of getting married I was also finally able to put out an album which personally was a huge thing…I don’t really care if people have listened to it but I’m proud that I’ve done it! Alongside that on a work aspect 2010 was great…lots of exciting things happening and all seem to be going well.

So…what does 2011 hold!

Youth Work Resource

My first real aim of 2011 was to give my other website (youthworkresource.com) a much needed overhall and content update. I last did some work to it early in 2010 and just haven’t had the motivation to update it but I committed chunks of last week to it and most of today and finally have loads of new stuff on there including sessions, games and video plus I have the new template working (oh and a twitter account too) – You can visit Youth Work Resource here.

I’m also going to try and make it more of an ongoing project…so I’m going to actually update the blog and add resources on a regular basis!

Music

Just after Christmas I managed to accidentally buy a stage piano which I’m trying to improve with…my piano skills aren’t bad but I’m by no means a Benny Fingers, so in 2011 I’m hoping for a lot of time with hammers and strings (all be they digital!).

On top of that my 1 and only new years resolution is to play at least 1 gig, which might not sound much but for me it’s huge…considering 5 years ago I wouldn’t go near a microphone and the amount of takes vocals on ‘Escape This Town’ took it should be a good but challenging challenge!

Writing

Finally and perhaps more on a musical note I have a new project going on called ’13 months’…the concept is simple…for this year (last December counts) I will write at least 1 song a month with the aim to recording them in January 2012 onwards…it’s an interesting challenge but I love the concept and the idea of capturing a year in music is awesome!

So that’s me and 2011 lined up….let’s begin 2011 week 2!

09/28/10

Going the distance…

Today ‘The Sun’ had an article containing the diary of a couple who lived 300 miles apart and it got me thinking about long distance relationships (Sun article here).

Most people who read this blog will know that prior to getting married in July Jo and myself managed our relationship and wedding prep long distance…whilst we were only 100 miles apart (unlike the 300 miles distance of the couple in the article) many of the same issues faced us as anyone who does distance.

Jo and myself started off bridging the gap between Great Yarmouth and Peterborough and then when Jo moved to university we bridged the gap between Sheffield and Peterborough (although my lectures often meant that I went to Sheffield from London).

At the moment I seem to know a few people in long-distance relationships and having been in a couple that didn’t work and 1 that worked out amazingly (for the record that’s Jo!) I can sympathise with the issues they face.

Perhaps the biggest struggle is time…and the longer your relationship goes on for the more difficult this becomes. When me and Jo started the distance journey we averaged once every 3 weeks….upgrading to once every 2 weeks when Jo was at uni and finally pretty much weekly when I started my job in South Cave last September.

The problem with the distance as time goes on is that the amount of time you get with each other seems shorter and shorter…wedding planning makes this worse! Whilst phoning is fantastic (and I’m convinced without Orange Magic Numbers we’d either be bankrupt or single) the same effect happens there too!

When you start with someone you like each other but I think (mushy butterfly feelings aside) it’s easier to be apart because your lives are less entwined however as you come more and more attached and deepen your relationship you find that that you talk more and desire to see each other more.

I guess the overall experience for Jo and myself was good…whilst it sucked to be 100 miles apart (the inspiration behind my song ‘Escape This Town‘) there was a lot of benefits so to finish this blog I thought I’d outline the positives…

Knowing Each Other More - The massive advantage of the phone is you have to talk…silent phone calls just don’t work…watching a film over the phone hurts your neck and ‘just being’ on the phone likens itself to watching paint dry. This leads (in my opinion) to you knowing each other better…in our marriage prep with St Andrews’ we wiped the floor with the other couples during ‘Mr and Mrs’ even though they lived together and had been together on average 6 years.

Trust - I personally found that the distance gave us a massive sense of trust in our relationship…especially when you go for weeks without seeing each other if you don’t trust each other then the relationship will fall apart.

More Understanding of Needs - As with all of the above positives this is specific on the person but I’ve found that the distance has meant we understand each other spending time with other people more and so it’s perfectly acceptable now we’re married to do some things apart (and together).

Just felt inspired to share those thoughts on distance as a response to ‘The Sun’s” article

09/11/10

Did you miss me?

If you missed my song Joanna on Premier Radio earlier you can hear my whole radio feature here

If you did hear it or you don’t want to hear a fairly poor sounding radio recording reminiscent of when you used to record radio to cassette and make mixtapes then you may want to download my entire album, in great quality, for FREE here

If you want the shameless music plugs to stop and real blogging to resume with some meaty thoughts then come back in a couple of days when I will have a new post written.

Finally if you download the album or listen and enjoy the music please tell your friends

09/7/10

I’m on Premier Radio this Saturday!

Back in May I released my first full length album titled ‘Escape This Town’ but I’ve never really done a lot to publicise it other than the odd tweet and link on my blog however a month or so ago I sent some demos off to Premier Christian Radio and UCB Radio with the hope of getting some publicity…and it worked!

This Saturday (11th September) tune into Premier Radio on freeview, sky, DAB, online or on local frequencies (London) between 6pm and 7pm to hear the track ‘Joanna’ off my album ‘Escape This Town’. Full details of how to tune in to Premier Radio here

If you haven’t downloaded my album it’s completely free at http://marktiddy.bandcamp.com ….just hit the ‘buy now’ button and name your price as 0 to get it free!

My next aim…to actually get around to doing some open mics!

08/14/10

The Wedding Blog

So Jo and myself have got married, been on honeymoon, received all the wedding gifts, received some amazing photos which we’ve put in frames, written thank you cards and received our wedding video (on a complete tangent if you’re getting married avoid Clearview wedding videos in Caister at all costs…worst, most unprofessional video I’ve ever seen…but it’s okay we’re making our own so not remotely bothered!) and for all intensive purposes everything wedding related is done.

However throughout the process of planning a wedding and all the learning we’ve done throughout I’ve wanted to finish it all off by writing a blog about my perspective of planning a wedding and maybe even throw in some helpful advice for those who may end up planning one in time to come.

The Beginning…

So we got engaged last July in Italy and knew that we wanted to get married this year…in fact we’d pretty much picked a date before we were even engaged! During our second week in Italy (the week after our engagement) our friends Tim and Wendy came out to stay in a nearby villa with their daughters and naturally having seen the engagement on Twitter they offered congratulations and advice.

There have been two pieces of advice that helped us immensely throughout the wedding planning and the first came from Tim in Italy. Being a minister Tim has helped many couples as they’ve prepared for their wedding and his advice to us was simply ‘be selfish’, informing us that there’s so many people who have preconceptions about how a wedding ‘should’ be that it’s easy to get bogged down trying to please everyone and that you need to remember that it’s your wedding not anyone elses.

This advice was enforced by a few other married friends of ours too and certainly proved absolutely invaluable…it meant we had to do some difficult things and make some difficult choices but looking back whilst we’d change the attitude of some towards us during our wedding planning I wouldn’t change any of the decisions we made in planning our wedding.

Generation Gap

It’s amazing how weddings differ and I guess what was fairly unusual (historically) about our wedding was that Jo and myself did all of the planning ourselves, between us we designed table decorations, picked colours, designed invites and did pretty much everything in between. For me this joint effort really reminded us of our similarities…there weren’t arguments about ideas it all just came together organically. There was so much unity between us in our planning Jo said it seemed odd buying a dress without me!

As we flicked through the photos last week and reminisced on the day Jo glanced at the image of the room and remarked ‘that’s what success looks like’.

Involving Friends!

One of the nicest things about our wedding was the amount of our friends that were involved. As part of the service we invited a selection of friends from all the parts of our lives to pray for us which was a really special moment, we had friends leading worship in a band, Stuart being our master of ceremonies and leading some games (the best reception idea ever, I might add!), and Steve driving is very nice Audi as a wedding car.

On the other side we also seemed to have a collection of people involved who were also Christian, our flowers were done by the churches’ flower guild, the cake baked by a lady at my parents church and our photographer went to a friend of Jo’s church but was also a professional photographer (http://www.bexphotography.co.uk…highly recommended…fantastic photos and top bloke).

On top of this Tony who led the service has known me since I was 11 and known Jo a few years too as we’ve gone to midnight mass and led their youth work on the church weekend away on one occasion.

All of this really made the day mean so much more…if you can get mates involved it’s fantastic…don’t get caught up with professionals get caught up with what means something to you!

Wedding Preparation

The most difficult thing to find time for when planning a wedding over distance was time for wedding preparation…we found a couple of opportunities. One in the form of a fantastic afternoon with St Andrews’ Church and the second on a lovely evening with Phil and Christine (the minister and his wife of Jo’s Sheffield church).

We’d also set out to read ‘The Marriage Book’…which we failed miserably!

My Final Advice…

Whilst I could ramble on forever about our wedding and preparation, our struggles and celebrations there’s just a couple of things I’d like to finish with…firstly my top 4 pieces of advice for planning a wedding:

1. Be Selfish - You’d be amazed at who has what ideas about weddings but you need to be able to tell people to butt-out, ask yourself what the two of you want as a couple and stick to that. For us this involved making some difficult decisions and discovering sides of people that neither of us liked but we know in doing that we were able to have the wedding we wanted and not be looking back now with regrets (thank you to all our friends who listened to us and prayed for us in our difficult situations)

2. Personalise! - Forget tradition…as an addition to advice 1 it’s your day so plan what you want…I hope that people walked away from our wedding saying ‘that was very Jo and Mark’ so make that you’re aim…and plan together (as a couple), you probably won’t regret it.

3. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask - Money is a massive issue with weddings and we saved some by having people we knew get involved whether it was cars or cakes and actually in having people we knew do things it made the day mean a lot more. There’s nothing like having a good friend drive you from the church in his car…if nothing else you don’t have to start the awkward conversation with ‘Been busy?’.

4. Make Time For Yourselves - Jo and myself spent a year pretty much just talking weddings and probably neglected us too much…try and make time for things other than weddings. I once heard someone say that for every 1 hour of planning you should have an hour for yourself…it’s far more difficult than it sounds!

Finally to finish this massive blog post I want to publicly thank my parents who were fantastic throughout the whole wedding process…they visited the venue, painted twigs, created a ‘wedding room’ in their house and were genuinely fantastic.

08/9/10

Wedding Photos

As followers on Twitter will know we received our wedding photos this week. The best thing about our wedding photographer was that unlike many others who give you a handful of photos and no digital versions we got an entire disc of over 300 edited photos from Bex Photography giving us an amazing choice of options of what to do with our photos.

I put them all online yesterday which you can view online here however my favourite by a long shot is this one (although I don’t really know why!)

07/12/10

4 Days to go…

It feels like ages since I clicked onto this blog to actually post anything (although my blog tells me that in reality it’s only 8 days)…however it’s been a very busy 8 days!

In 4 days time (Saturday) Jo and me get married! It barely seems like yesterday that we got engaged in Italy and after much planning the ‘Jo/Mark’ wedding plans are nearly done…I made a last phone call today to the reception venue, sent a few final e-mails, checked out cake progress and spoke to our DJ and other than writing a grooms speech (in which I’m told I can’t make incest jokes…although I thought pointing out having 2 sets of parents at a Norfolk wedding being novel would be amusing) we’re ready!

Jo’s been doing a few last minute bits and pieces of prep too and the last major things now are just to meet with Steve (who’s kindly driving us) and have a rehearsal on Thursday night, then doing a few bits Friday and eventually having a few beers with Joel and some others Friday evening.

Whilst I’m sure wedding photos will surface on this blog Jo and myself are also planning to write a ‘wedding blog of 2 accounts’ in the next few weeks where we shall try to be as open and honest about our experience of planning a wedding…hopefully adding some tips, frustrations and an insight into how we planned our wedding.

I’ve also been thinking about doing a blog on spiritual warfare and how it linked into our wedding prep which may surface sometime next week if I have time to write it before the wedding…it may sound like an odd combination but it feels like it makes sense!

Anyway there’s a brief wedding/life update…if you’re coming on Saturday please don’t bring confetti…we have bubble…and pray for us (and good weather).

06/7/10

My Casino Experience

On Friday night I had my first Casino experience.

For Lucy’s 21st a group of us headed up to the Hull branch of ‘Napoleons’ to celebrate! The only experiences I’ve ever had of gambling come from 2 very different perspectives.

The first perspective is that of the tacky gamble…I grew up being taken to holiday camps (which I might add I enjoyed) and spent my teenage years near Great Yarmouth and all these places are filled with amusement arcades tempting you in to throw 2p’s down a chute or to pay 20p to attempt to win a child-manufactured teddy bear from a rigged machine (yes the cranes are fixed!).

The second perspective is right at the other end of the scale and come from watching television shows like Hustle when they attempt to con a huge casino where people have more money than sense…dressed in their suits and using their casino jargon the Hustle team would attempt to con casino owners without being caught by the security.

Thankfully Napoleons is far more like the Hustle casino than the Great Yarmouth arcades but it’s a very different world to that I’m used to. My parents have never really had money to throw around and being a Christian I’ve grown up with fairly sensible teaching of money yet a fair amount of those in the casino had evidently not had this upbringing.

There’s something very surreal about watching someone throw £50 (of tokens) on a 1 in 50 chance number on a roulette table and not be remotely phased that they’ve just lost £50….there’s equally something surreal about watching someone win £150 and throw it straight back on.

The nice thing about the whole experience was that we didn’t spend the whole evening losing money but we had a very nice 3 course meal first and a few drinks (good old diet Pepsi!) before exploring the Casino area with the £5 of chips we got with our meal.

I guess the important thing before doing any form of gambling is to limit yourself and think sensibly about things beforehand…whilst many Christians would argue that gambling is wrong I believe the bible merely teaches that the love of money is wrong…so gambling is fine as long as you’re sensible and it doesn’t come before God (or your family…bets vs meals is silly!).

Armed with my £5 of chips I headed to roulette and fairly quickly got the hang of it and equally as quickly lost my ‘free’ chips so I took some time out before spending another £5 and that was it. The roulette was fun but it was far more luck than judgment (as are many of the games in a casino).

So all in all I really enjoyed my Casino trip…I won’t be becoming a regular but it was a great night…certainly more sociable than a night club.

and how did I do with my 2nd £5?

Somehow I managed to win several times and cashed in £25 and walked away with a profit! Good times!

04/13/10

The King Blues Gig

Last night Jo and myself went to Manchester to see The King Blues play on their headline tour. I got into The King Blues just over a year ago and love their blend of ska and acoustic punk combined with fantastic, passionate lyrics.

I first saw The King Blues back in September as part of Hull’s ‘Freedom Festival’ where they played a set of about 5 songs and got the whole of Queens Park (about 2000 people) to shout ‘F*** the BNP’ and whilst the sentiment is nice I wasn’t sure that a park full of families was the place for shouting it…perhaps ‘We don’t like the BNP’ would have been more appropriate.

Last night after the usual mix of good and awful support acts the King Blues took stage…lead singer Jonny Fox launched into the first song dancing around madly with his ukulele whilst the rest of the band joined in.

The band continued through an energetic set including ‘Underneath this lamppost light’, ‘Mr Music Man’ and ‘Let’s hang the landlord’ mixed with passionate speaking about how the people have the power…ringing true to the anti-facist vibe of the band. They also played some new songs including ‘Headbutt’ which has been on their Myspace fo a while now, like headbutt all the new songs took a more heavy punky feel about them.

All in all a fantastic gig…the passion and energy from the band really made the gig!

04/11/10

London

So in the last week in my blogging break I’ve been to Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Sheffield, South Cave and London…lots of wedding planning done, lots of potential blogs thought of but I’ve resisted the temptation to blog…until now!

I have a love/hate relationship with London…I got quite used to the business of our capital city during my 3 years studying with Oasis with the more-regular-than-I’d-have-liked trips to London…catching a 7:15am train, rushing past the slow moving crowds at Kings Cross Station and shoving my way onto a tube train which could only be described as a business-man mosh-pit.

Whilst I didn’t amazingly enjoy those early mornings, long days and the general business of London I do look back on that time with some fondness…largely the sarcastic comments we’d make during lectures to each other…10 youth workers in 1 place is not a good combination as we seem to put on the persona of the young people we work with!

However despite my dislike for busy places London is a great place to visit occasionally…it’s crawling with interesting stuff to do and places to do and on Friday myself and Jo went down to London to ride the eye and go on the boat cruises (the Christmas present I got for Jo after she talked about wanting to visit London properly).

The London Eye was the view from the office block where I had lectures and so actually riding it was an interesting experience, we had a beautifully clear day and so could see for miles and miles from the top and the experience of being inside this pod looking down upon London was great…although a glass floor may have been the icing on the cake.

Surprisingly though the river boat was my favourite bit of the day….we took the boat from the London Eye to Greenwich and the commentator on the boat was fantastic…he was informative but at the same time interesting mixing his facts with pub guides, sarcastic comments and a generally dry sense of humour.

The other part of London we spent some time in was Camden Market…we visited Camden back in January and the market there is fantastic but continues my love/hate relationship with London. The hundreds of stalls are great to browse through, the smells of the Chinese, African, Mexican and numerous other foods are fantastic and make you hungry and some great little shops hidden within the madness.

The problem with Camden is that all the sellers are very pushy which tends to put me off having a proper browse because you feel under pressure and whilst for many people I suspect this sells plenty for me it just puts me off and I wander away!

The best bit of Camden was this independent music shop on the main street full of records and CD’s…I walked away with Blood Sugar Sex Magik (Chili Peppers) and Welcome the night (the Ataris) for £1 each…bargain!

To conclude this post here’s some photos….

03/23/10

Day 35: Wedding Planning

Since Jo and myself started planning the wedding in August we’ve realised that actually it’s not that difficult to plan a wedding…there’s been a few difficulties but when it comes to the actual planning, idea collecting etc we’ve both realised that we tend to sing from the same metaphorical hymn sheet with both of us agreeing on pretty much every aspect of wedding stuff.

I haven’t really updated my blog on wedding stuff much largely because we have a wedding blog but I thought today I’d give a very brief update!

We have so far organised: church, reception venue, meal choices, guest list, suits, website, photographer, flowers and invites. We handmade all the invites (video blog below) and posted them about a month ago. In the last few days we’ve sorted our order of service, finalised the worship band and I’ve sorted out the bans being read here in South Cave.

All in all doesn’t feel like there’s much to do…bring on July

Here’s the video blog...more over at www.markandjoanna.co.uk