Finding Doggerland

For my 40th birthday, my fella got me an unusual present - DNA testing kits for both of us from the private company 23andme. We both had to spit into a testtube, which was then collected by courier and whisked off to a lab in America, where it was then analysed to reveal information about our ancestory, traits and health.

We were emailed that our results were in, this morning, so logged on to the website to find some interesting information, and in 20 minutes everything and nothing changed.

I first looked at my ancestory. My maternal lineage is Haplogroup H1a1 (a haplogroup is a combination of DNA sequences which are passed down from parents). People from H1a1 are mainly from Scandinavia, although they're also found in Western Europe, especially Spain (we always thought my mother's mother had Spanish heritage). My paternal lineage is R1b1b2a1a1*. This tends to be focussed more around the North Sea, especially England, Germany and the Netherlands. Apparently some of both my maternal and paternal ancestors lived in Doggerland (named after Dogger Bank), a land mass that joined England to Europe and eventually vanished when the sea rose about 9000 years ago - it's like a real-life Atlantis. Weapons and bones are regularly found in the North Sea, dating back to when Doggerland existed. Here's a map that someone speculatively created of what it could have looked like



So I'm from a country that until this morning I didn't even know existed, and it doesn't even exist any more. That's pretty mind-blowing. It's not like I can go back there on an ancestral pilgrimage.

The analysis also tells you what percentage of your DNA is neanderthal or caveman. Apparently the average Northern European has 2.6% caveman DNA. Mine is 2.8% which is in the 80th percentile - so I'm more caveman than most people around me. Maybe that explains my heavy eyebrow ridge and big nose (apparently for it's for protection from cold air).

I then moved on to look at health. Your DNA is examined to see if you are a carrier of dozens of different hereditary illnesses and other traits that may or may not end up being expressed as actual diseases. The bad news is that I'm twice as likely as the average person to develop Alzheimer's Disease - the average risk is 7.2% - mine is 14.2%. I also have an increased risk of a range of other nasties, including high blood pressure, stomach cancer, throat cancer, aneurysm and osteoarthritis, although the risks of these things are actually very very low anyway - so even though my risk of stomach cancer is double the average - it's still only 0.4%. I can live with that (probably). And I have a decreased risk of lots of other things including diabetes, melanoma, rheunmatoid arthritis, gout and migraines. I'm quite a bit less likely to have heart disease or Parkinsons. So, you win some, you lose some.

In terms of traits rather than diseases, I discovered that I should never try heroin or cigarettes (I'm likely to get very addicted to both). I also have a genetic marker for low tolerance of pain (which reminded me of yelling out when pulling off a plaster yesterday - at least I can blame my genes for being a softy). The analysis correctly predicted my hair and eye colour, and that my wee would smell funny if I had asparagus. Apparently, I don't metabolise caffeine very well, I'm likely to sneeze in bright sunlight and I don't have a gene that gives me enhanced athletic performance, although I do respond normally to exercise and diet by losing weight (so I have no-one to blame if I get fat but myself - in fact there were a couple of other genes which said I shouldn't really be fat at all - so I'll really be to blame if I get fat). I was also relieved to see that I have substantially decreased odds of going bald - which kind of fits with what I'd suspected. And I have one of the markers for HIV resistance - apparently 1% of people have two markers and are very unlikely to become HIV+, whereas 10-14% of Europeans have one of the markers, which means that if they are infected, there's a good chance that the disease will take a long time to show up. Weirdly, my fella has that same marker as well.

It's fascinating stuff, but as I said, it changes everything and nothing. I'm not too bothered about my increased potential to develop Alzheimer's, though I think I will start having more decaff drinks. Of all the information, what really affected me was the Doggerland stuff, though I suspect most Europeans could probably trace ancestors back there. Still, as birthday presents go, this beats a pair of socks!

Guilty pleasure

My parents went on "honeymoon" (a year after they married) on a package holiday to Spain, in 1973 and hated it. They won't talk about it, but it was enough to put them off "abroad" until I was all grown up and forced them to come with me to Rome, many many years later. My father, who is 65 at the end of the month, announced on Saturday that he never intends to go on holiday again as he can't bear "waiting around for trains and planes" and they're quite happy staying at home.

I would never go on a package holiday to Spain either - though it is more due to middle-class snobbishness rather than a general dislike of travel and "foreign things". But I have recently discovered the ITV series Benidorm, which, while revelling in the awfulness of such holidays and the people who go on them, ends up making you like them.

Benidorm feels like a natural inheritor of the British Carry-on films and seaside postcards. It has a regular cast consisting of British stereotypes and eccentrics, lots of rude jokes, class-based humour, bizarre visual jokes and a faintly moralising sentimental ethos. The establishing shots show Benidorm as hideously built-up with miles of brutal-looking tower-blocks dominating the skyline, while the opening credits show Britons at their worst. The series is set in the Solana Hotel, an "all-inclusive" resort which resembles a hospital built in the 1990s, where guests have to wear a yellow-arm-band to get the free food and drinks, and the specially laid-on entertainment largely consists of karaoke in a large hall (self-entertainment in other words). Many of the holiday-makers bring no money with them and never bother to venture out of the hotel grounds, instead preferring to fester by the pool, getting drunk, being unpleasant to one another and eating.

The central "common" family, the Garveys, is headed by leathery-skinned gnome-matriarch Madge, who is never without a cigarette and sits resplendent on her disabled mobility scooter - the punchline being that she can walk perfectly well - but she's on holiday and doesn't see why she should have to use her legs. Madge has never been troubled by a kind thought in her life, and her many daughters have mostly disowned her, except for affable Janice - who is played by Siobhan Finneran who also plays evil O'Brien in Downton Abbey (as well as Rita from cult 80s film Rita, Sue and Bob too!). Janice is married to lazy Mick (League of Gentleman's Steve Pemberton), a typical benefit scrounger so beloved of the tabloids. Like an infestation, the family keep returning back to the Solana year after year, encountering other holiday-recidivists like Donald and Jacqueline (dim swingers), Kate and Martin (disgruntled middle-class couple there by mistake and Kafka-doomed to keep coming back despite their efforts to escape) and delusional overweight quiz champion Geoff and his slow-witted mother/PA Noreen. As the years progress, newer, ever more flamboyant characters emerge.

There is a lot of flabby, aged, wrinkly or otherwise oddly-shaped flesh on display, and while we are encouraged to laugh at the gluttony, petty criminality, idleness and poor taste of the working-classes, nobody comes off well in Benidorm - the "posh" characters are exposed as inauthentic (like Martin's mother played by Una Stubbs), stuck-up (like Kate) or deluded and weak (Martin). The message is that the working-classes may be vulgar, but at least they know how to enjoy themselves with simple pleasures like a burger, a lie-down by a pool or a good singalong.

Similarly, sexuality of any sort is made fun of. There is a stereotypical gay couple called Troy and Gavin (one is fat and camp who uses a black fan with a flourish as a prop, the other is tall and thin and slightly less camp). They are accepted by the other holiday-makers, as are the swingers - who are always genuinely sorry when they inevitably mistake someone as being from their sauna back home or misread an innocent suggestion as a sexual come-on. A gruff transvestite played by Tim Healy, while the butt of visual jokes is reasonably sympathetically treated, and "normal" heterosexual desire is punished - Martin's lust for a con-woman results in him losing his passport and money, while Janice's brief dalliance with a much younger man brings her no happiness (and he ends up locked in the boot of a car).

While there are brief glimpses of Spanish culture and countryside, the series hasn't managed to tempt me to venture onto an EasyJet flight. I'm happy to enjoy Benidorm at a distance.

Half-moved

My fella and me have a year's sabbatical starting in August, which means we can live anywhere we like. This has been the subject of much discussion and planning over the past couple of years, and the original plan was to rent out our house and spend three months in each of the following locations: New York, London, Sydney and Brighton. However, the practicalities of such a globe-trotting year quickly meant that we had to reduce our plans quite a bit. We have an elderly, high-maintenance cat who, on the one occasion when I left him with a live-in cat-sitter for a month, went into a deep depression and took to sitting in a corner of the living room with his back to the wall. Taking the cat abroad would also be unfeasible due to quarantine restrictions. So instead, we are spending a fortnight in August travelling across from Chicago to San Francisco by train, followed by a week in Brighton.

The other issue which brought us back down to earth is cost - I thought flats in London were quite reasonable initially, but then I realised I was looking at the price per week rather than per month. So the capital city was out (and anway, it's so unfriendly and competitive). Eventually it came down to a competition between Brighton, Bristol or Newcastle-upon Tyne. I like all three places, but ultimately it was the bonus of having friends and family in Newcastle which was the deciding factor. My fella, very kindly let me make the final decision, although he stipulated he wanted to be in "walking distance of a Waitrose".

So we've found a nice apartment (near a Waitrose), overlooking a park, in a fancy Georgian terrace. And this weekend, we moved in half our furniture. My fella bravely drove a van across. I caught a cold earlier in the week, so it wasn't the best timing - and our efforts to move the bulky sofa were worthy of a Laurel and Hardy film. Lots of comedy accidents. And we have to do it all again in July when we move the rest of the stuff.

We thought the boiler was broken, but just as we were phoning British gas we realised that the strange box in the kitchen cupboard with a credit card sticking out of it was a pay as you go meter - put in because the previous tenant didn't seem to like paying any of his bills. We hadn't seen one before so I'd just kind of ignored it as irrelevant. So we had to get the card "topped up" at a newsagents. There were lots of "final demand" letters for the last tenant, including some from bailiffs and an £800 phone bill. He sounds charming. There were all sorts of weird little things we had to resolve over the weekend - I had to buy a new toilet seat because the one they had didn't stay up (why? how?) At least it gave us an excuse to go to John Lewis a lot.

Oddly enough I don't think we'll use that Waitrose much. There's a huge Marks and Spencer next door to it - the food hall is about 8 times bigger than the one in Lancaster - and it has things we've never seen before like Luxury Garlic Bread - Lancaster only has the regular sort. I feel so cheated - like one of those Russian diplomat's wives who went insane on first seeing a British supermarket in the 1980s.

So between now and August we'll be living in two places, echoing that period in 2006-7 when I lived in Bristol and commuted back to Lancaster. I have strong and fond memories of Newcastle - I used to go shopping there in my childhood, although the enduring memory is of never having any money and doing a lot of enviously staring in shop windows wishing I could buy stuff. I recall going to an all-night showing of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead films at one of the cinemas, and when I was a student, I visited my friend Kathryn (who still lives there), and we used to spend a lot of time going around the charity shops (it was the early 1990s - grunge was just coming in), and watching foreign films at the Tyneside Cinema (we thought we were so sophisticated). During the summer of 1992 I discovered Newcastle's gay scene - in those days there were a lot of men wearing check shirts with moustaches, and I had a brief relationship with a chap who was high up in the civil service and wanted to take me to Egypt.

Geordies only seem to have two vowels ("a" and "oo"), so I'm sure in a year's time I will be incomprehensible all over again.

Memories of My Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum, arguably Britain's first famous home computer, is 30 today. I have fond memories of my 48K Spectrum, and its big sister, the 128K which came later on. Using the Spectrum was often a frustrating experience. There was no screen - you plugged it directly into a tv (in my case an ancient black and white thing in the dining room). It had a tendency to overheat and reset itself, and it ran programs from a tape recorder - so you'd have to wait up to 10 minutes to play a game, again with the random tendency for the uploading of data to get to the end and then just reset. The keys were rubbery, a bit unpleasant to touch, and you had to make copious use of combinations of different keys in order to get it to display certain commands like "POKE" (which I never really understood - it was very different from poking in social media).

Quickly, my weekly comics (Jackpot and Buster) were replaced by ZX Spectrum magazines, and I would spend hours typing in programs in order to play a very basic-looking game that probably had a typo in it and wouldn't work anyway. I suppose it helped me with my keyboard skills, and kept me off the streets if nothing else.

On the rare occasions when I got a Spectrum game to actually work, the experience of playing the game itself was often just as frustrating. Games were not meant to be actually won, so programmers tended to make them as difficult as possible to complete. Sometimes they would have weird bugs, like "The Hobbit" which always froze when I got to the cellar of the wood elves. It was usually impossible to save data, so if you died, you had to go all the way back to the start and do it again. But many of those games are indelibly marked in my memory. Here are my favourite ones.

The Hobbit



The aforementioned Hobbit was one of my favourite "adventure" textual games. I loved text adventures more than any other type of game because it was like reading a book with endless possibilities and you had to use your imagination to supplement the lack of fantastic graphics. There was the feeling with these games that you could go anyway and say anything, even though in reality most of what you typed in would be ignored unless it fit a very specific set of instructions relevant to only one point of the game. But I loved how The Hobbit took a great novel and let you play through it. I loved that there were TWO mazes in it (which I spent hours getting lost in and trying to map). I loved that you could talk to Thorin and Gandalf (even though they didn't have much to say), and I loved the graphics - which at the time appeared to be amazingly sophisticated and complex.

Jet Set Willy



A truly amazing platform-based game which had the shocking innovation of allowing the player to wander between different screens, each one a room in a giant mansion. As the tune "If I Were A Rich Man" played on a loop, you had to jump, run and avoid weird moving objects, and collect strange sparkling ones. Occasionally, if you went through the wrong hole, you'd get stuck in a weird infinity loop and lose all your lives in an instant. It wasn't fair and I'm sure it was impossible to compete without resorting to cheats.

Pimania



This was one of the first games I ever played when I got my computer, and the whole family spent Christmas Day in awed shock. Someone appeared to have used a very weird drug trip as the premise for a computer game. It asked me for my name and then later on referred to me by it - as we were unfamilar with what computers were capable of, we half-believed that this game was somehow watching us and responding to our movements. It was a text adventure, which involved moving by typing in numbers and collecting various strange objects like a hula hoop, valium and a pork pie. The B side of the cassette contained a surreal pop song, and the game was actually a real-life competition - you had to play it to discover clues to where an actual golden sundial was hidden somewhere in the UK.

Sabre Wulf



This was my favourite game from the successful Ultimate stable. You were an explorer in a huge jungle maze, and you had to collect four pieces of an amulet to escape, and also avoid a wolf whose territory extended over several screens and could run very fast. There were different coloured orchids and if you picked them it would result in various effects (blue made you run faster, yellow sent you to sleep etc). It was deliciously garish.

Knight Lore



Another "Ultimate" game which brought the innovation of 3D graphics - this was mind-blowing when it came out, and inspired dozens of copy-cats. Unfortunately the game itself was a bit boring and also difficult. You were the same explorer from Sabre Wulf, but this time you turned into a werewolf occasionally, and you were trapped in a castle, having to collect objects and move blocks around to get past obstacles. I always seemed to get killed by falling metal spikey balls :(

Spellbound



A graphical 2D room-based adventure featuring a knight who had to move around, collecting objects and giving them to various people or casting spells in order to open up new bits of a castle. What made this game interesting was its use of "Windimation" - a system where menus would open up and you selected an option from one of several. This was a somewhat more forgiving game in that it didn't kill you off at a moment's notice but allowed you to think through how to do things.

The Trap Door



A crazy, colourful game based on the children's animation series, this game was fiendishly difficult - you had to make various recipes by gathering weird objects and putting them in a cauldron. Quite often, the objects were alive (like worms) and would run around trying to escape from you, while a spider would also chase after them trying to eat them. Playing this cute looking game often induced feelings of panic in me as time ran out.

Broke Back Gym

Well, I am 40 in slightly over a month. This blog, which I began almost 10 years ago chronicles all of my 30s (at least the stuff I'm prepared to share with the whole world and several people who know me in real life). Prior to that, the private diaries I kept in my teens and 20s give a much more introspective and confessional account of my life.

I don't think I look too bad for 40. I still have all my hair, and most of it is still brown, save a few grey ones. There is only one permanent line on my forehead. The dark circles under my eyes make me perpetually look tired, but I blame them on genetics. I get plenty of sleep - more than anyone else I know. At the gym last month, I had my annual "check-up" which meant I was taken into a cupboard and measured by one of the receptionists. She told me that I'd gained 5 cms around my shoulders and lost 5cm around my waist. It's true that I've gone back to 32 inch trousers, which I last wore around the age of 25. And there are funny bumpy bits in my back and shoulders that didn't used to be there. I've cut out crisps, orange juice and "healthy" smoothies from my diet, so that's probably helped.

But there's been a price to pay for getting back my mid-20s body. For a year, several times a week I went to circuit classes at my gym, organised by a man I refer to as "THe PE teacher". The classes involved lots of high intensity running, jumping, bending, stretching and lifting weights. The PE teacher shouts a lot (it's motivational), and also decides how heavy the weights should be that you lift. It gets results, but has also left me with back problems which started before Christmas and ensured that I spent most of Easter on painkillers. Worryingly, my father is 25 years ahead of me with his own bad back, and had an operation last month as he was barely able to walk at Christmas. He used to work on a farm as a teenager, and lug around 9 stone bags of concrete all day, so no wonder he's broke his back. I only have vanity to blame for my situation. And also poor work habits. Twice a week, I usually work from home. I like to boast that I don't need an "office" like some of my colleagues who claim they can't work unless they have a south-facing room over-looking a brook with no traffic noise, and lavish bookshelves etc. Having being brought up in a little council house where the tv was never turned off, I view such sentiments about people needing workspace as precious and excuses for laziness. So my "office" is my sofa, and there I can sit, for up to six hours a day, laptop on lap, only minimally moving to get a cup of tea. This set-up used to work fine, but now I've damaged myself through exercise, my body doesn't like to sit in that position any more. So I've relocated to the dining room table. Quite a few people I know have bad backs at the moment - so maybe it's the fault of laptops making us all put ourselves in slouchy postures.

My doctor gave me a pamphlet about bad backs based on the latest research. I was expecting it to contain lots of weird exercises to do and descriptions of scans you can have done on the NHS. Instead it simply said - don't take to your bed - keep moving around, do exercise, go walking. Take painkillers to manage the pain. Don't be pessimistic, expect things to get better and they probably will. So fingers crossed.

The other sign of middle/old age that I'm experiencing is weird memory issues. My fella accuses me several times a week of forgetting conversations we've had. He says my memory is ruthless in excising information it doesn't want to keep - and he's right there. But I think it's getting worse. I sent an email to a work colleague yesterday, asking her to help me with a task. But then realised I'd sent her the exact same email before Easter. But when I tried to find that first email, I couldn't find it. It never existed - I just convinced myself I'd sent it, when I hadn't. Not only am I forgetting things, but I'm inserting in new false memories of things that never happened in the first place. At least eventually, I won't even be able to remember that I've lost all my faculties... Happy 40th!

Finding Madame


My new favourite obsession is Madame, a sassy-talking old lady puppet from the 1970s and 1980s. Madame was the brainchild of Wayland Flowers, who was a skilled puppeteer rather than a ventriloquist - something which he had Madame say at the start of their routine "Wayland's no ventriloquist and I'm no fuckin' dummy!" However, once Madame started talking, all eyes quickly fell on her, and Flowers became almost invisible. Bedecked in her "fuzzy" (a boa with a life of its own) and her summer diamonds ("some are diamonds, some are not"), Madame's party piece was to let down her hair from the bun it was tied up in, halfway through the act, in a bizarre display of frenzied shaking and contorting. As I said, Wayland Flowers was a skilled puppeteer.

In the 1970s and 1980s gay men were largely absent from American mainstream culture, although gay humour will always find a way - and one way that this was achieved was to have women standing in for gay men - particularly older women who were no longer attractive (although they still saw themselves as desirable and were insatiably desirous of men). The Golden Girls were a good example of this, and here's Madame with Bea Arthur (another Madame), singing "A good man is hard to find" while exchanging potshots with one another (and fighting over Rock Hudson - naturally).



Madame's larger-than-life personality was based on campy movie stars like Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson and particularly Rosalind Russell in Aunt Mame. Much later, Karen from Will and Grace also channelled Madame (and in one episode where she catches sight of her aged face in the mirror, Karen retorts that she should have Wayland Flowers' hand up her ass). Madame was a wise-cracking mistress of the double entendre, and while her tv appearances were reasonably "clean", her stage shows cheerfully threw around four-letter words for shock effect. The 1980s were perhaps the last decade of "light entertainment", where audiences would still politely sit through puppet performances - and I recall many variety shows on Saturday afternoons with Keith Harris and Orville (although I'd much have preferred Madame). Even with a puppet as sharp and "adult" as Madame, I'd be surprised if she'd be allowed to entertain today's more demanding audiences on tv.

When Paul Lynde left the panel show Hollywood Squares, Flowers and Madame set up residence in the centre square - the place reserved for the celebrity with the wittiest barbs. Sample question: "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Strauss lived in the same place. Where was it?" Madame's answer: "At the YMCA!"

Madame also appeared as a regular on 1980s pop show Solid Gold, interviewing, insulting (and at times flirting outrageously) with singers and providing the links between ad breaks: "We'll be right back with more great music so don't you dare move. I'm not moving either because, well... I think I'm having a STROKE!" Here's a typical escalating exchange she had with Marty Harty:

"Hindenberg nose!"
"Chicken lips!"
"Chicken legs!"
"Chicken eyes!"
"Chicken neck!"



In 1982 Madame appeared in her own sitcom "Madame's Place" which starred a young Corey Feldman and was notable for featuring a "talkshow" portion where Madame interviewed the likes of William Shatner. She also featured along with several other of Wayland's puppets in a tv special called Madame in Manhattan. This included Crazy Mary (special skill - getting herself stuck to the floor in a most unusual way), Shirley (Madame's dresser) and Jiffy (a prostitute from Harlem). The show features much of the stage act, but then goes slightly surreal as Madame and Wayland start waltzing around Battery Park together (on a very windy day), and finally there's a sequence where Wayland tucks Madame up in bed and tells her that she's very special to him: "I was teased a lot as a child, I was different, I was sensitive. But I had a grandmother who raised me, protected me, and taught me to believe in dreams. She died when I was young. I cried a lot. By myself. Then one day, there you were, needing me just as much as I needed you." Then he sings "Someone to watch over me" to her. It's a rare moment of Wayland taking centre stage, and it could have come across as schmaltzy and silly, but somehow it doesn't. A camp outlook on life is often developed as part of a coping strategy, because life can be very cruel to those of us who are "different and sensitive". Camp allows you to make a joke out of less than desirable circumstances, being passed over, getting old, being bullied or laughed at. Wayland's coping strategy just became externalised more than most - he laughed first and laughed loudest and longest.

Wayland died of AIDS-related complications in 1988, aged only 48. And I know Madame was with him all the way to the end.

Prisoner Cell Block Lancaster

Lancaster Castle (one of the world's oldest prisons) closed down last year and today, for the first time in 50 years, the prison grounds were open to the public. My house looks on to the castle gates and I've often wondered what's behind the walls. So I grabbed my camera - and here are some views that previously you only could have seen if you'd committed a crime.



The castle dates back to the 11th century and has been used as a prison since 1196. There are marks made by musket fire around the gates when Royalists attempted to take it back from Parliamentarians during the civil war. It held the Pendle Witches who were subsquently hanged, and its court was used for the trial of the Birmingham Six.



The Pendle witches apparently cursed anyone who visited Lancaster to have to keep returning there for the rest of their lives.



Hangings were done in public, ostensibly as a deterrent, although in reality hangings garnered large crowds and there was something of a carnival atmosphere, with people selling food and the local schoolboys getting half a day off. The vicar of the overlooking priory church sold tickets so people could get a better view from the ramparts of the church and avoid pickpockets below.



Some prisoners ended up having to stay on in prison for up to three years as they were unable to pay for the gaoler for their "upkeep" at the end of their sentence.



The Duchy of Lancaster, who owns the castle, is currently consulting on what to do with it. It would make an interesting, if rather claustrophobic hotel. (After only a few minutes of wandering around the enclosed court-yard spaces I was starting to feel a bit nervy.) It could also be a good performance space. But I hope it becomes a museum - not only would it bring a lot of tourist trade to Lancaster, but its rich and varied history is fascinating and deserves to be shared with as many people as possible.