This page updated: 05/01/05

Long before LiveJournal took over my life, I tried to do a similar thing with my own code (see below).  Nowadays I just rant online to anyone who’ll listen (though I’m a bit wiser now than when I started).  If you want to see exactly what I’m up to at the moment, click here.  Cringe, laugh, weep, stare in bewilderment.  All emotions are there to be experienced...

In the meantime, a quick synopsis:

Born Belfast, N. Ireland 24^th March 1975.

Moved to Nijmegen, Netherlands late May 1975.

Moved to Church Village, Welsh Valleys, UK, Spring 1977.

Brother (Peter) born May 1977

Moved to Cardiff 1978

Jobs: see occupations, I don’t have time to list them all!

Hobbies over this time: writing for Cardiff University’s student newspaper, running the A Cappella Group

Partners:

Ø        Anthony: June 1991-August 1991 (he dumped me when I got better GCSEs than him and wouldn’t sleep with him)

Ø        Rob: May 1995-August 1995 (he disappeared off the face of the planet in a scarily efficient fashion)

Ø        Nathan: October 1995-January 1996 (I dumped him after realising I had gone out with him on the rebound... oops)

Ø        Will: November 1996-October 1999 (we split amicably when it became clear we weren’t getting married and still remain close friends – and yes, he knew about the next two!)

Ø        Zoë: February 1997-March 1997 (she picked one of the other four women she was seeing at the time!)

Ø        Jo: October 1998-April 2000 (I dumped her when I realised we were essentially incompatible and handled the whole thing very badly – I hope I never hurt anyone like that ever again)

Ø        Elinor: June 2000-February 2001 (she dumped me four days before leaving the country, leaving me heartbroken)

Ø        Keith: September 2001-April 2004 (he dumped me when it became clear that our goals in life were incompatible)

Ø        Kelly: September 2004-January 2005 (I was unable to handle being with someone who loved me as much as she did. I hope someday to be forgiven (not only by her but by Fate, her grandmother, and single people everywhere))

Lived in Cardiff (Rhiwbina 1979-1982, Roath 1982-1986, Cyncoed 1986-2000, moved out into small attic flat with mate (Rob year 1, Helen year 2) in Roath August 2000-July 2002, Pontcanna on my own until leaving Cardiff) until April 2003 when I moved to Milton Keynes to be with Keith.  D’oh!  When that went wrong went to live on my own for 6-7 months, and currently living with Roger and Carla (who are partners – of each other) in a 3-bed detached house in MK.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer (and secondaries in her lower spine) in September 1996.  After radiotherapy, aggressive chemotherapy, a mastectomy, remission, steel rods in her back to support her crumbling spine, remission and decline again, ending in slow degeneration in hospital February 1999-July 1999, she died on 31^st July 1999.

My dad remarried in early January 2001, getting hitched to Selwa, a fellow doctor (and lovely lady).  They had a baby daughter, Miriam (known as Mimi) in January 2002.  She is lovely beyond bounds; I would defend her with my life and more if I had to give it.  In keeping with other Roberts traits, she has curly dark hair (okay, my blonde hair’s a blip in the gene pool!), long eyelashes, is intelligent, verbose and articulate (already), has a good sense of rhythm, loves to dance, sings well and is stubborn as a mule.

My brother, Peter is doing a PhD on some obscure aspect of Jacobean literature.  He absolutely seems in his element!  At last, and after a long, hard time.  He works like a mad bastard – I’m very, very proud!

Me?  I’m still in MK, now teaching and working as a project officer (until at least August 2005) and loving life somewhat...  I currently plan to go back to university in September 2006 to get cracking on the old PhD.  Update: I’ve recently been told that funding for the Aimhigher project may be available until June 2006, which would suit my plans perfectly!

Watch this space!

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Back in Spring/Summer 2001, I was introduced to this concept known as ‘friendsreunited.’  A small website with the aim of bringing old friends together.  I don’t think anyone realised how ENORMOUS it would become...  Anyway, I went and investigated and signed up and wrote my piece about myself.  Now, here’s the thing.  I hadn’t gone and checked what other people had written, just went ahead and wrote my biography to be viewed by people I used to go to school with (it only offered schools at that point).

What I didn’t realise was that everyone else was writing entries along the lines of:

Did my degree, am now an accountant in London.

or

Am living with Richard and two lovely cats.

{groan}  I wrote:

After leaving Howell's I did a degree in joint honours Physiology and Psychology.  University was great: finding out who I could be after all this time and making so many new friends.  Took a year out after that, working and freelancing, then did an MSc in Computing (those of you who remember me as a bit of a computer nerd weren't wrong...!).  After that worked for Cardiff University for 18 months and now a year later here I am.

Still living in Cardiff - in a funky little attic floor two-person flat on Marlborough Road, Roath, complete with skull-breaking sloping ceilings.  I am currently working part-time for the Cardiff & Vale Coalition of Disabled People as their Temporary Administrator, probably until about September '01 (unless I see something better in the meantime).  I am also running my own business from home.  Check out http://connect.to/atscardiff - I do typing and graphic design work for anyone who wants it at a very reasonable rate (sorry: not an advert, honest!).

My mother died in July 1999 after about 3 years of fighting breast cancer.  There's nothing more to say about that which is appropriate for this site...  My father remarried in January '01 (to a fellow doctor) and they seem to be ridiculously happy together, which is very cool indeed.

I'm currently single, having broken up with my girlfriend in February just before she left for a year out in New Zealand (all very dramatic, don't fancy going through all that again!).  I've been having fun being single recently though, so it's not all doom and gloom!  Oh, and before you ask, yes: I did know in school... did you? ;-)

I'm still singing, running my own choir (The A Cappella Group) which is brilliant, nearly 7 years old now,  and takes up more of my time and energy during university terms than pretty much anything else, and I love it!  I've also recently joined a band which is just starting up (it's an all-girl group too, no name as yet before you ask), doing our own music etc.  Watch this space: we may be on TOTP yet...!  I and some other members of A Cappella will be providing the music for a production of Hamlet in Castell Coch in August, which sounds frankly frightening, but very cool.

Other than that I spend my time reading, writing (songs, stories, articles, the occasional very poor poem), listening to pretty much every type of music under the sun, cycling, spending FAR too much time on the internet, dancing like a maniac when I get the chance and getting on with enjoying life.  I still have scads of mad curly blonde hair and more allergies than you can shake a stick at (I've developed some new ones since school: yippee! :¬| ), but I'm a lot happier; a WHOLE lot happier since when most of you last saw me in 1993...

I'm planning to go to the V2001 festival (August 17-19th I think) - my mate Will and I been to every V festival since they started in 96, so it's kind of a tradition now.  If anyone wants to meet up with us there, that would be very cool indeed.

Hope to see/speak to you soon!

Love Fay x

So you can see how my friendsreunited entry become... um... notorious.  Because it was so damned typically me.

I refuse to delete any of it, just keep tacking on updates (heh heh).  Go see.

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Previous journal entries:

May 2002
June 2002
 

20^th May 2002

Have decided to create a web-site at long last (you’re looking at it!)

Got back from Milton Keynes and London last night after having been to see Keith (surprise), do some role-playing and go to see Star Wars Episode II in Leicester Square. Seeing Episode II (I refuse to use the subtitle) with a bunch of dedicated (and religiously well-informed) Star Wars fanatics was only a little unnerving. The film was good – very pretty – and better than the last one. Will probably go and see it again for the geek satisfaction of spotting all the little details I failed to spot first time round. Look, it’s all right if I call myself a geek, right? Kind of positive self-affirmation, like calling myself queer...

Am currently unemployed. Again. Last week’s débâcle with the illness and the ominous phone call and the dramatic losing-of-the-timesheet has morphed into this week’s numbing tedium and fear of poverty. Thank God for freelance work...

Am trying not to flesh out Plans for the Future too much at the moment. Have decided to wait and see if the college course comes through. Have applied for NVQ Level III Course in Holistic Therapies (massage techniques, aromatherapy, reflexology, heat treatments, acupressure and all sorts of other exciting things) which starts in September. Everyone has been very supportive and a curiously large number of friends/family have offered to help me with my homework... May have secured part-time work starting September, which would be very cool if it comes off.

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24^th May 2002

Hurrah! Today has been a very full day. Got paid finally for last Pertemps (my temping agency) job – it was all a bit disturbing/depressing because the contract ended for peculiar reasons and to top it all they lost my timesheet! Went for an ‘interview’ for another temp job, this time in Welsh Health Supplies (a branch of the NHS), which I got – start on Monday. It looks like it’s going to be a very interesting job – lots of variety – and they’re happy for me to be continuing with the Sign Language course on Monday afternoons. I’m not going to get too excited about it because I have a habit of doing that and it all goes horribly wrong...

On the way out of the door to the taxi to the interview picked up my mail, which included a letter from Coleg Glan Hafren offering me an unconditional place on the Holistic Therapies Course. Very chuffed. Surprised to hear so quickly, too, as I only had the interview last Wednesday. Looks like Colette’s character reference letter worked a charm (I used to work with Colette in the Cardiff and Vale Coalition of Disabled People); what a star!

I had the opportunity to thank Colette in person when I went to the Coalition for some ‘consultancy’ work: basically showing my successor (Robert) how to find and manipulate various data sources on the machine. Caught up with a few of my old colleagues, checked out the new hairstyles... Robert is an interesting one – had more in common than you’d suspect from the surface. Very interesting discussions. Upshot: 1 hour’s consultancy work, 2 hours’ gossip. A good balance, I thought...

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28^th May 2002

Have started working for Welsh Health Supplies in Llanishen Industrial Estate. Lucky for me they do flexi-hours. Unluckily for me I can’t do any work until they’ve trained me, and no-one’s available to train me, and because I’m not trained I can’t obtain the staff status necessary for me to access the information on the computer that someone this morning thought would be a good idea for me to research. So, I’m on Emma’s computer, I’ve printed off MILLIONS of pages about electrodes, tubes and masks, and I’m sitting here (this is real-time latest, folks) listening to the lads in the office gossiping about Big Brother (Matt is obsessed). My boss keeps looking at me helplessly (when I can actually find her) and then tells me she’ll be back in a minute and they’ll have something for me to do. My last encounter with her was a while ago...

Ah, the joys of temping. Come along kids, it’s a great way to work!

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5^th June 2002

Written in work, about 3:05pm

(No-one saw my come in, no-one gave me any work, no-one saw me leave. It should be fun being invisible, but it’s really not. Cheap high-heeled shoes are not the way to go either...)

I’m bored. Bored, bored, bored. I started to write a song about how bored I was, but the boredom has sapped my energy and I didn’t get much further than something about I am so bored, the most bored person in the world, etc., but that was about 20 years ago (about 10:30 this morning). Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrsssssssse.

FFFFF____III_____SSS____H___H

F_________I_____S_______H___H

FFF_______I______SSS____HHHHH

F_________I_________S___H___H

F________III_____SSS____H___H

I wouldn’t mind so much apart from the fact that I can’t even access the internet and download/just look at stuff; check my email; do something other than Microsoft Games (Minesweeper may be addictive, but it’s also DULL, and knackers my already brutalised wrist). I’ve got a book (Magician, by Raymond E. Feist), but so far it’s a little too standard fantasy (okay, so he may have been a standard later others were set by/ripped off/satirised, but still), ho-hum, run-of-the-mill. I think I’ve been infected by Goth-ness – the characters haven’t suffered enough yet...

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I’m being forced to consider that there’s the remote possibility that I’m actually quite a dull person. It’s a bit scary.

In case you’re interested (did you get this far? well done you!), I’ll let you know what I did over the extended weekend. For some reason, Britain had two Bank Holidays to celebrate the Queen’s 50^th Jubilee. As a marketing exercise for the Queen it seems to have been quite successful; have you seen the last few front pages of the Sun? There’s a growing acceptance of British patriotism in a positive way – I saw a LARGE number of British and English flags over the weekend (well, I was in England), and very few of them on teeshirts/cars of boy racers and skinheads. Either nationalism is more acceptable nowadays, or these things demonstrate a positive pride in one’s own nation (rather than axiomatic despite for everyone else’s). The Sun, however, decided to go with that desperate and horribly-sugary Royalism that it so loves to portray. Here, British public, is what you will think, how you will feel, spelled out in simple and emotive words (love, grand, beautiful, stirring, we, we, we) with big pictures. Maybe I should start reading the Sun – can’t properly comment until I know what it is I’m going on about. I can talk, really – I mean, I barely make an effort to keep up with current affairs, watch no news (well, I don’t have a TV at the moment), reads no newspapers unless I’m job-seeking, live in this closeted world of me-and-my-friends, only give to reasonably nice-looking homeless people, don’t get passionate anymore about issues, rights, wrongs, what big corporations are doing to the planet, recycle desultorily and mechanically rather than out of any sense that I’m doing any good or it means anything, hardly peek outside my head anymore. I’m disturbed by this. Who am I becoming? Am I truly getting old?

Anyway, an interesting weekend. Drove up to Milton Keynes on Friday with Rachel D. (a.k.a. "Blonde Rachel") in a hire car. I’m not convinced that a Fiat Brava is a well-designed vehicle, but it was cheap (as hire cars go – believe me when I say I checked a lot of alternatives), it had wheels, the tape player worked and we could fit us, our stuff and three passengers inside. Handily. We arrived in Milton Keynes late dusk (which is pretty late at the moment), I unloaded all my crap, Rachel took off home and I snuggled with the still-fridgeless Keith. I have a feeling that this domestic lack is about to become legendary – I think I explained the absence of fridge approximately twenty times on Monday. Well, what’s the second thing you ask when you come in to a party, especially a barbecue? By people’s reactions, I gather my deadpan was fairly comical. Possibly in a slightly scary way. I’m jumping ahead. Anyway, arranged to meet up with Rachel on the Sunday at the pub with whoever various she managed to drag along (Rachel has a long-legendary capacity for mass-communication) and managed not to ask Keith what we were doing on Saturday. I’d received a cryptic text earlier in the day: "packing tip: bring something formal to wear... a posh frock or similar." Apparently our destination was to be a surprise and, since I love surprises, I was more than happy to turn off investigative instincts.

As Saturday progressed, certain things became more clear. We had to leave the house by 7pm, we were snacking beforehand, it was just going to be the two of us going. Well, yes, I did work out we were going to the theatre, but it was still very cool. And although the play wasn’t earth-shakingly fantastic (‘Deathtrap,’ starring the bloke from Starsky and Hutch and a bloke from Casualty), the seats were very good, the theatre good, the ice-cream delicious and I had the world’s biggest shit-eating grin, radiating smug-as-they-come and very happy at anyone within a seven metre radius.

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I’m vaguely getting to know Keith’s friends now. They’re a pretty disparate lot, mostly linked (by primary or secondary routes) to Ludamus (sp?), a theatre company based in Milton Keynes who seem to have an eclectic repertoire, to say the least. His friends are mostly graduates of the same sixth form that hosted Ludamus, although a fair number of them are still roped in (with token protest at most) to productions, the latest of which is called something like "The Hills of Papa Nawenuay." Weird Spanish/Mexican musical thing. Simon is looking for musicians and people who can help make sets and props (including my favourite: the singing cactus). If any of you want to come up in July and help out...

During the day, these people are: programmers, theatre technicians, students, researchers, accountants (I think), writers and teachers. Some of them also continue the as-long-as-we’ve-known-each-other-long tradition of role-playing. I’ve been sucked into the world of role-playing after years of being an interested social observer ("some of my best friends are role-players"), although I draw the line at the games where they move little model men and use rulers to plot the positions of their pieces ("okay, that means I can move my elves 3 centimetres and my archers can fire at your demon warlords"). At this rate I’ll be taking up Korfball too...

[All around me, people are doing actual work. This seems a little surreal – I’ve been locked in a world of writing for about 1½ hours, a distraction for which I’m grateful, but it is a little peculiar to ‘wake up’ from this and find myself in an office...

What do they think of me, these actually-working people? Do they notice that the NHS are paying something like £9-10/hour (of which I see £5.80 before tax) for me to sit around reading, writing and playing Minesweeper?

And, typically, I’ve managed to leave my antibiotics – the vilest-tasting drugs known to mankind – at home. Only two left to go, too...!]

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6^th June 2002

So, where was I? Anyway, shorter version: drove to Milton Keynes at the weekend, hated the car, got to see Keith in a suit, got to dress up, got to catch up with people, didn’t get rained on (much), there was no fridge, went to the theatre and the pub and bought food for a barbecue that morphed into a party, had a good time and not much sleep (but loads of sex and food, so that’s all right!).

They found things for me to do in work; how cool is that? Well, it was reading bits of paper to see what was in the file (taxing) and faxing many bits of paper (opportunity for gossip with the Director’s PA who has the other fax machine in her office). Said fuck off to the girly shoes and wore hiking boots (well, they’re not trainers) under my ridiculously large, flared office trousers. No-one noticed and my knees are much, much happier.

Spent a fair amount of last night on the internet (surprise!). Every day I get to delete large quantities of emails. These people really don’t do any market research; I’m constantly being exhorted to buy pills that will: reduce my weight, combat baldness, put a stop to my snoring and increase the size of my penis. Oh dear. "Consolidate your debt now!" "See Britney and Shakira gang-banged!" "Wild hot animal lovers!" (I never look – I just delete; I’m hoping it’s something to do with tropical wildlife preservation but just in case...) "Your account size is too large!" Witness my surprise – only five days away and it’s groaning at the seams.

I’ve been getting some feedback about the site. Which is good – hey, I know someone’s looking at it. Apparently a few of you have been looking at the stories, too. It would be nice to get some more feedback, even if it’s yuk! And if it is critical, constructive would be favourite.

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This page updated: 06/06/02