The 2nd week of Blaugust ends tomorrow. Introduce yourself is the optional prompt for the week. That’ll do me for today…
Tell us ten random facts about the human behind the blog.
- I landed on earth 179 days before the first man set foot on the moon.
- Four times around the equator is about the same distance as I have cycled since 2012
- In 2008 I was unlawfully arrested under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000
- A registered mental health nurse since 1992
- Very little interest in food other than a means to not to feel hungry. Also vegetarian.
- Parallel parking is a super power.
- My lateral incisors never grew and there is gap between my two front teeth.
- We (my wife and I) have four children. All boys.
- I can play a Jew’s harp really loudly. I am also pretty good at whistling.
- The place I came into the world was in the grounds of what at the time was called a mental hospital. There was close to 2000 beds there.
Tell us about your absolutely favourite entertainment media.
I spend way more time listening to music than I spend on any other entertainment media. On my phone, MP3 player and lap top. Here’s some listening stats from Musicbrainz for the year so far.
I also like going to live music events; festivals, sound systems, concerts, open mic nights…
Tell the story behind the creation and name of your blog.
My online space has gone through a few changes of name and platform since I started to put stuff on the internet back in 2000.
The first site I created was called Cosgrove Capers. The name was taken from the block of flats we lived in at the time, Cosgrove House. The purpose of the site was to keep a digital scrap book and share news with relatives about the first year of our oldest sons life. There was weekly updates, snap shots and a few audio files. It was a weblog. At that time I did not know blogs were even a thing. The pages were created and hosted on a service called Homestead.
Over time I added content related to getting married in that same year. I created a project called Drawstrings. We asked everyone we invited to our wedding to complete some ‘profile questions’. These were compiled into an album that was shared with everyone at a pre wedding party. The idea was to have our extended families be part of a shared project to help get to know one another a bit. I was thinking that a wedding and reception where people were not total strangers would be a good thing. It worked out pretty well.
BongoTwisty 1 2 on Hugo is my current effort and has only been going since the 7th July this year. I do not have anything to track stats. In the past that has been nothing but an unhelpful and demoralising distraction.
Previous incarnations under different names have been hosted on Blogger, Wordpress and Standard Notes Listed.
Where content has not fallen to the wayside or otherwise been lost, I’ve migrated it from one platform to the next over the years.
I have seldom posted consistently for a sustained period of time. Keep going long enough though and it all adds up.
What other hobbies do you have besides blogging / the topic of your blog?
I ride a bike, take photos, collect music, and enjoy learning new stuff.
Tell us about the part of the world you live in like you’re trying to attract someone to visit.
Visit Chatham, the jewel of the Medway crown. Situated on the dip slope of the beautiful North Downs in the garden of England. Steeped in naval history. Home to Billy Childish, “one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood, figures on the British art scene”. Once home to Charles Dickens regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.
The earliest memory I have of being called Bongo goes back to early infancy. My sisters used to call me Ali. We had a red revolving see-saw in the garden with white plastic seats on either end. I recall a day when I was on one side and my older brother was on the other. I remember him calling out “Aliiiii”, each time his side went down and I went up, then “BONGO!” when I bounced up from the seat as the see-saw bottomed out on his end. A lot of laughs at the time. As an aside there was a popular TV magician called Ali Bongo back in those days, which I guess is why the words came to my brother’s mind. After that day my brother called me Bongo pretty much all the years we grew up together. The name caught on with all his mates. On the very odd occassion we meet now, my brother and his old friends still call me Bongo when they see me. ↩︎
When I left school I worked at a print shop. The boss read a book with a character in it called Colonel Twisty Turner. The colonel had a twisted bowel and farted a lot. My boss thought that was hilarious and as my surname is Turner decided I should also be known as Twisty. I mentioned this name to my friends and they thought it was a great fit. Not because I farted a lot! Because of the way I got things done and turned out positive, unexpected results. Again the name stuck and travelled with me into my early twenties during the time I trained as a mental health nurse. I’m still called Twisty now by the friends from those years who I maintain contact with ↩︎