"But you're not the type..."

Greetings dear reader.

I seem to have spent a considerable part of my life being told that I'm "not the type". For example, apparently I'm "not the type" to have my nipples pierced, even though I in fact have had both done. For a long time I was apparently "not the type" to get married (this was probably at a time when I was perceived to be homosexual because I had an interest in musical theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, and because I used to pick up sailors in public lavatories.)

Normally I'd put this down to having been born, bred and subsequently escaped from Stoke-on-Trent, a city which competes with Cheltenham as being the Home of Irrational Prejudice. (Cheltenham clearly wins, for the obvious reason that any sign of ethnic minority in the area gets cleansed faster and more effectively than a white tornado. For what it's worth, Stoke is 19 miles from Stafford, the Spiritual Home of Miserable Bastardy.) However, it's somewhat worrying when otherwise intelligent people seem to have me pigeonholed for no apparent reason. I could compile whole radio station playlists of the records which apparently stick out of my collection like a whole incineratorful of sore thumbs (the complete Bach Organ works, Bran Van 3000 and Aerosmith seemingly having no place in the same apartment as multiple copies of "Pet Sounds" and a glut of Count Basie records. And owning Ella Fitzgerald albums, I was once informed by a former colleague - a Senior Lecturer at one of the area's esteemed Polyversities - was hardly a butch thing to do. Fuck Butchness, I'm in it for the music.)

My short reply, then as now, is that if you have nothing better to do than blindly put people into categories, then you surely deserve to be surprised, shocked or even offended. Personally, I prefer to imagine I live in an egalitarian society where people are accepted or otherwise only on their merits, and try to behave accordingly. (For those who don't know, an egalitarian society is rather like a vegetarian society, except you eat eagles.)

The latest point of confusion in some of my dearest ones' lives is the fact that I will be participating in the London to Brighton Bike Ride for the British Heart Foundation on 15 June. Now, I suppose I can understand this one to an extent. This time last year, I was of gargantuan proportions - my 6ft 3in frame was holding up 24st 5lb of flesh and fat. Mostly fat. In the last twelve months, through a combination of extreme stubbornness, arrogance and bloody-mindedness, I've managed to lost a quarter of that, and am now a lithe, limber and actually still quite fat 18st 9lb. I did it of my own volition, without allowing nurses and dieticians to talk down to me.

True, I've changed my diet to something more healthy (and a kebab tastes so much nicer when you feel as though you've earned the right to eat it.) However, most of it has dropped off me through cycling the 12-mile round trip to the City Centre from my flat and back, three or four times a week.

A friend put the idea of doing the London to Brighton into my head last summer. At that time, the prospect of cycling more than 3 miles in one go made me reach for the nearest comforting block of lard. However, through persistence, in February I managed to cycle the 56 miles to my mother's house in Stoke from our flat in Birmingham, purely to prove it could be done. And, that done, my friend and I applied for and have been accepted on the official London to Brighton ride this summer.

Of course, on being tapped up for sponsorship, there have been those (thankfully few) people who, instead of pledging a couple of bob, have decided to tell me that they think I'm making a grave error, that I "wasn't built" for cycling those kinds of distances (actually, I was. It was puberty that sent me on the inexorable slide to the sweet shop: I was thin and athletic as a child, and have the pictures to prove it), and even that the recent accident I endured (having come off my bike in high winds, I broke a thumb and needed stitches in my elbow) was God's way of warning me off doing the ride. This from a person whose sole exposure to churches has been during weddings and funerals.

I'd have settled for a frank, "I'd rather not sponsor you if you don't mind." The strangest thing is that these people, after the rant, went on to sponsor me.

Sometimes I have trouble in figuring out how the world actually works!

[By the way, if you would like to sponsor me, you can do so by visiting http://www.justgiving.com/martinfenton . Thanks.]

By the way, I've also been informed that I'm not the type to eat broccoli. This is because I didn't like the stuff when I was five years old. People, eh?

Finally, among the feedback I've received for this blog (alright then, the only feedback) are a couple of requests for me to explain the title "An Insect, Dropping Its Pollen, Being Frozen". It's one hell of a story (aren't they all?), and should make a suitable subject for my next post.

Until then...

Greetings, or a Rant About Research

Greetings, gentle reader. No, don't click away just yet. As the great Billie "File Under 'Gay Interest' on eBay" Holiday once sang, "It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place...", and I feel the need to let off steam. Which seems to me to be the ideal set of circumstances to start a blog.

I don't know about you, but in our home the bathroom doubles as a reading room. There's always an assortment of books and periodicals developing mildew in the corner - some of them essential, some of them frankly deserving of nothing better by way of storage.

I've not decided yet, but I'm starting to think that into the latter camp should fall my current Bog Book, a paperback about the unreleased 1967 version of the Beach Boys' "Smile" album, written by Domenic Priore. The basic premise of the book is good and generally honourable. It's just a pity that the thing is full of mistakes.

Perhaps at this stage I should explain to those who don't know me that I have something of a background in research, and pride myself on my methodical, don't-accept-anything-at-face-value approach. Indeed, it was this approach which recently had me biting my tongue when the researcher of a programme being made for BBC Radio 3, for which I'd been contracted to do some archive audio restoration (my current, freelance day job), kept calling to basically ask me to do her job for her. (And all because I possess a standard reference work which she'd never heard of, relying mostly on Wikipedia for her information.)

Back to the book: the particular error which made me pull my trousers up and consult the internet was the revelation that record impresario John Dolphin was murdered by soul legend Percy Mayfield. Had the names been less obscure in this day and age, the claim wouldn't have been out of place on "Brass Eye".

Mayfield, conveniently, died in the 1980s, thus leaving his name open to libel. Dolphin's murderer, as any cursory Google will reveal, was a struggling songwriter by the name of Percy Ivy. Mayfield was probably busy writing "Hit The Road, Jack" at the time.

Some may say that the Mayfield reference was simply a minor faux pas, but it does seem to highlight a problem with the media in general at present. Many of my friends and former colleagues work within the various media, and we have all bemoaned a general dropping in standards, from publishers who assign frankly clueless supervisory editors to books, to a major broadcaster openly deciding to "fair deal" archive clips in the hope that they won't get sued by the performer or copyright holder, thus potentially tainting the reputations of the vastly experienced researchers and authors whose names are on the package.

Even the once-mighty EMI aren't above such incompetence: a few years ago, they reissued - to great fanfare - the American versions of The Beatles' albums on CD, in both mono and stereo formats. (In those days, not only did unique compilations get issued in different territories, but records were generally put out in mono and stereo mixes which were often deliberately quite different to each other.)

When the CDs of the second box set hit the stores, it took a matter of minutes for Beatles anoraks to establish that the mono mixes were not the authentic originals, but simply the stereo transfers reduced to mono. Cue widespread internet hysteria and an expensive about-face for EMI, who replaced the duff discs once lawsuits had been threatened.

Sometimes you have to wonder just who is minding the store.