Special Guest Post: P.H. - "Have You Read My Blog?"

Welcome back friends to a very special one off edition of my blog. A guest post from an avid disciple of mine who feels partially responsible for my weekly instalments of fertilizer. We are colleagues and friends who bounce ideas and banter off each other at any given moment. I must warn you that he is a psychiatrist type of person so most of this will be nonsense but I’m guessing that you are used to that otherwise why are you here? Introducing P.H. my budding sidekick…

Guest Post From P.H. – “Have You Read My Blog?”

Down in the basement of a well-known retail store in Aylesbury is a stock room affectionately known to all who work there as, “The Bat Cave”. If you dial 226 from the front of store phone to check on stock supplies your call will be answered with the words, “Bat Cave....” It was the Bat Cave where this blog was born. Not that the first words were committed to digital paper there, just that like many more before it, Captains Blog 1984 was born there as an idea. Now I don't know whether this particular room happens to sit on an intersection of lay-lines or if it was built on an Indian burial ground that somehow gives it special qualities but it's fair to say that as an environment conducive to generating ideas, the Bat Cave has an above average hit rate. The difficulty can be though that in the best interests of the majority of people, at least some of these ideas will hopefully never see the light of day. But from time to time thanks to the above average hit rate just mentioned, out of the ether does arise the occasional gem. This blog being one of them! But of course I don’t think it would be fair to say that the environment there is solely responsible for the creation of these ideas. There is at least one added ingredient that I think contributes largely to this phenomena and that is one of the Bat Cave’s most frequent of residents; Gareth Goodchild. I am not Gareth. This week he has made room for a guest post, (whilst he no doubt sits down to a meeting with his feline companion to discuss next weeks ‘Cat diaries’) by myself, someone I am pretty sure he considers to be (at best) his ‘sidekick’ in his vision of his future online endeavours.

As the person in charge of preventing loss within the store, much of Gareth’s time is spent looking busy in the stock room. I should know, much of my time has been spent looking busy making it appear clean and tidy. As people come and go from the Bat Cave all day long you'll likely catch a conversation on your way in or out; a way to revolutionise shopping on the Internet, a forth coming block buster novel or the developing ideas of a zombie stage musical are all highlights worth mentioning. But there are times where a more accurate image of the conversation is that of sitting in a juggernaut with Gareth at the wheel whilst he purposely sets you on a collision course with all manner of socially edgy destinations. Your job then is to grab the wheel and steer both yourself and Gareth back to safety whilst keeping him entertained enough for him to allow that to happen. It's my perception that giving him the space to drive to the edge of oblivion every now and then is like opening a release valve so that his 'special' ideas don't end up on this blog. You’re welcome. I do admire his commitment to his ideas though; it took him all but one evening to follow through on his idea to start this site. One thing concerns me though. Having grabbed the wheel enough times I've developed immunity to pretty much anything Gareth says or does, but in the case of his blog, I find my mind being moulded and primed in surprising ways. I haven't looked at a BMW driver the same since post number four, I dislike The Only Way Is Essex even more than I already did and frankly, I want a cat.

I'd be interested to hear what everyone else has to say about Captains Blog - When do you read it? On your way to work? At work? When Gareth has asked you for the twentieth time, have you read my blog!? We had a new Christmas temp start with us the other day and I swear she’d been in the building for less than half an hour before I caught Gareth ‘casually’ dropping his blog into conversation. I don’t blame him really. Personally, I read it half asleep at 6:15 on a Thursday morning before my mind has a chance to defend itself, which is almost definitely why I’ve been so susceptible to its influence. What about you?