Canine Capers

 We have talked about getting another dog for quite a while. Our previous dog (known as "The Sausage", "Tess" or "Zoltan Hound of Dracula" depending on who you asked) died 5 years ago and various other factors have got in the way of us getting another mutt - whether that has been aging cats, small children, moving house or just not quite getting around to it. Our Whippet, Eddie, is now 10 years old and he is starting to show his age. Recently, he has been like Bambi on ice when on a slippery surface and he is not up to the kind of long walks that I used to take him on. We had made enquiries with the Whippet and Greyhound rescue charities as to whether there were any suitable dogs a while ago and on Sunday we had a call from them asking if we were interested in a two year old male Whippet.

We made our way over to the kennels in Lochwinnoch (one of those really satisfyingly sounding Scottish place names - a bit like Auchterarder or Ecclefechan). The dog in question is called Sam and he seemed to get on well enough with Eddie so we took him home. He isn't entirely house trained - he had previously been kept outside and the harsh Scottish winter means he is a bit chunky and has rather fluffy fur at the moment: less silky Whippet, more like Fuzzy Felt. He is also more a traditional Whippet size - Eddie, in spite of his Kennel Club certification, has always been nearer in size to a Greyhound. Aside from that, the two dogs look surprisingly similar - both fawn coloured with big brown eyes.

So far everything seems to be going well. Eddie seems to appreciate the company and Sam appreciates indoors, fitted carpets, the couch and central heating.

Stinking Colds

I've got a cold at the moment. Presumably of the common variety. I used to get colds all the time - often combined with sinusitis and a persistent cough. However, over the last few years I don't seem to be bothered by them as much. It is meant to be one of the compensating factors of getting older that common colds become somewhat less common. However, I put my change down to the fact that I no longer use public transport on a regular basis. Getting a train into the centre of large metropolises may be convenient but the downside is that they tend to be disease ridden hellholes (and not just ScotRail, either).

So why the cold now? Well, I've got no conclusive proof, but I used the Tube in London last week. Sure enough, four days after returning home I had the starting of aching legs and a runny nose. The Tube may be a fantastic form of transport (well, compared to the maelstrom that passes for road transport in London) but it isn't so great for one's health and wellbeing. In fact, having done a search, a University of Nottingham survey established that those visiting their GPs for a respiratory condition were 6 times as likely to have used public transport than those that had non-respiratory illnesses. Of course, there could be other factors at play but given that it is an enclosed environment where multiple hands will touch multiple hand rails and the air is in continual recirculation it is a premium location for spreading viruses.

I'm not even sure that it could be prevented - other than requiring Tube passengers to wear face-masks and gloves. However, government strategies for dealing with influenza outbreaks always concentrate on "at risk" groups. Maybe they would be better off concentrating on season ticket holders?

Television Centre

When I was growing up, Disney World in Florida was supposed to be the special place that children longed to visit - at least that is where they always seemed to send terminally ill kids to have the holiday of a lifetime. I could never quite see the attraction but I was always fascinated with another location on the TV: the BBC Television Centre in London. For me this was the magical place where the boundary of dream and reality would become blurred. It's odd that for a place that seems so familiar, I have never seen it in the flesh as such. At least, that was until yesterday when I finally saw the inside of that strange and wondrous world...

I was actually down in London for a business meeting. The firm I work for supports the IT equipment for the BBC and the morning involved various discussions about all sorts of technology related matters. I was taken "on-site" to get a better idea of how things plugged together in the real world and I did genuinely discuss computer related matters for a good 10 minutes - honest! Our host found out that I was a bit of a Doctor Who fan and this led to a full tour of the building. Now I am supposed to be all middle aged and responsible but I honestly felt like a child let loose in Wonderland - if I'd known I'd be shown the whole site I'd have taken a decent quality camera but, as it was, I only had my rubbishy works mobile and not everything came out too well. These were the better ones:

I really wanted a decent picture of the iconic front wall. The sun was right on the camera so this was about my third attempt and it actually came out much better than I anticipated.

They have one of the current TARDIS props sitting outside and I didn't have the heart to tell my guide that I used to live in Glasgow where we have real Police Boxes sitting around on the street. It's actually a bit of a con because the new series is filmed in Cardiff.

This is the central fountain which I remember best from Roy Castle's Record Breakers with hundreds of tap dancers around it.

This is me pretending to be Alan Hansen on Match Of The Day (or should that be Pavel Srníček). What can I say: "Very, very poor defence, Gary."

This was the old Blue Peter set. I did have a picture of me behind the "makes" table but it was far too blurred. I couldn't find any sticky backed plastic either. The shot of me presenting the weather on the Blue Screen didn't really work either.

This is a snap of the roof in one of the scenery warehouses. Apparently, this has listed status but the walls don't - I'm not sure how that works. My guide told me that this was the inspiration for the original TARDIS roundels. I'm not sure whether that is a little TV centre folk law.

This Dalek was outside the BBC shop but I took a picture as it's the campest looking thing I've seen: Ooh! Get her!

The BBC are currently in the process of moving out of Television Centre. I think it's a great pity because this was such an iconic building. I think I belong to the television generation - those born in the 1960s and 70s who grew up with television, and the BBC in particular, as a cultural heritage. Times have changed and I probably only watch the News and occasional sporting fixtures live as broadcast with everything else being on the PVR or streamed online. Certainly, my own children do not get the concept of a TV schedule and the idea that a TV show could be a point of reference to the whole nation seems lost on them. I can't help but think that we are really going to miss this cultural glue with TV centre being it's high cathedral.

Doppelgänger

With online communication becoming more common in the workplace it is not that unusual for peoples' identities to become confused. There is someone called Robin Maxwell who is sometimes confused with me. We work in different areas so a stray email is usually easy to spot. What is more unusual, and slightly unnerving, is when one is confused with someone else by a physical resemblance. When I was at school there was another, slightly younger boy who I was occasionally mistaken for. Once, my mother confused him for me which must say something about her observation skills. When I lived in Cardiff, an elderly lady once mistook me for someone called Laura. Now, I was much younger, prettier and had quite long hair at the time but, to this day, I still wonder what kind of 1.87m Amazonian figure this Laura must have been. I think the old woman must have been a glacier cherry short of a fruitcake.

I suppose when it gets spooky is when one's Doppelgänger is someone famous (or infamous). Some people have made decent careers as celebrity lookalikes. A young couple made some serious dosh last year as they looked (vaguely) like Prince William and Kate Middleton. My experience of being mistaken for a celebrity of some description was when I lived in Newcastle upon Tyne and I would be frequently mistaken for the Czech Republic national goalkeeper, Pavel Srníček. Now this may, at first sight, appear to be somewhat far fetched but, at the time, we lived within a couple of miles of each other (admittedly, he lived in a much nicer area). He played for Newcastle United back then and much of the confusion could be tied down to a crap hair-do.

In my early twenties I suffered from Alopecia areata - an odd medical condition which meant that I lost patches of hair. This wasn't like male pattern baldness but meant that I had noticeable odd hairless patches on my head. To try and cover this up a styled my hair to be centre parted and held this in place with copious amounts of hair gel and other styling products. It didn't look that brilliant but it covered the bald patches apart from a bit that was missing on my eyebrow. At the time, Pavel Srníček also had some weird centre parted hair-do. However, I don't think he suffered from any random baldness - he was a professional footballer and therefore compelled to have a crap hair style. I did have a look to see if I could find any old photos of myself at this time. In fact, I rather avoided having my photo taken as I was self-conscious about the hair loss. I did find this photo which shows the missing eyebrow (no idea who the blonde was).

The confusion with Srníček seemed to start when I was out on the Town Moor walking the dog. I would get teenage kids shouting out, "Pavel. Pavel! PAVEL!", until I looked around to be asked, "You, with the dog. You're Pavel Srníček, aren't you?" Apparently, explaining that I wasn't Mr Srníček wasn't enough and I was once even asked for his autograph - which was a bit annoying as it's a bugger to spell. The thing was, I eventually started getting stick for his footballing performances: "Pavel. Pavel! PAVEL! You were shite on Saturday!" I actually thought this was rather unfair: not so much that I was getting stick on his behalf but because I seem to recall that he was a pretty decent player. Newcastle were doing very well at that time and his performances for the Czech national side weren't that bad either.

After a couple of years my hair was growing back normally so I abandoned the centre parting and hair gel and reverted to a more conventional side parting. The odd thing was that Pavel did something similar a the same time. However, by this time I had moved on from Newcastle and the mistaken identity had been left behind. I saw a picture of Pavel Srníček recently and he looks quite smart with a goatee beard. I tried to grow a beard once. It came out ginger with flecks of grey: it wasn't a good look.